Creativity Quote by Jimmy Rushing

There is a quiet defiance tucked into that plainspoken sentence: “I liked roaming around by myself.” Coming from Jimmy Rushing, the Kansas City jazz shouter best known as a cornerstone voice in Count Basie’s machine, it reads like a small insistence on personhood inside an art form built on tight ensembles, band discipline, and nightlife schedules that could swallow you whole. Rushing’s public identity was often communal by design: the singer as one more instrument, locked into Basie’s swing, selling a shared groove.

So the line works because it refuses the romantic myth that musicians are always surrounded, always “on,” always fueled by the crowd. “Roaming” signals curiosity and motion, but “by myself” is the payload: independence as pleasure, not punishment. For a Black working musician in early- and mid-century America, that independence also carries risk. Moving through towns, trains, backstage corridors, and segregated streets wasn’t a neutral stroll; it meant negotiating attention, suspicion, and the constant math of where you were allowed to be. The calm tone suggests he’s claiming that freedom anyway.

It also hints at how swing-era artistry actually gets made. Bands thrive on togetherness, but musicians need solitude to listen, to watch, to steal little details from the world and turn them into phrasing. Rushing, famous for turning everyday language into rhythmic authority, sounds like he’s describing his process: wander, absorb, return with stories in your voice. The understatement is the point. He doesn’t justify it. He just admits he liked it.