Creativity Quote by Joe Williams

That line draws a hard boundary between performance as choice and performance as compulsion. Joe Williams isn’t romanticizing talent; he’s naming the kind of inner pressure that turns singing from a hobby into a survival strategy. “Want” suggests appetite, ego, maybe even vanity. “Have to” suggests necessity, the thing you do because the alternative is psychic suffocation.

Coming from a jazz singer who spent decades inside bandstands, clubs, and the long, unglamorous miles between gigs, the quote carries lived context. Jazz isn’t built for the casual dabbler. It demands stamina, reinvention, and a tolerance for being misunderstood until the room catches up. Williams came up in an era when Black musicians were expected to be both impeccable and disposable: the voice as livelihood, and also as the one instrument nobody can set down. When you “have to sing,” you’re admitting that the voice is not just an asset; it’s a calling with teeth.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to the neat mythology of “following your dream.” Williams frames art less as aspiration than as compulsion - the reason you keep showing up even when the pay is thin, the industry is fickle, or the culture has moved on. It’s a line that flatters nobody, least of all the singer. It tells you the job isn’t to feel inspired; it’s to answer the need, night after night, and let that necessity be the engine.