If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising.

I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

I had always intended to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. I don't suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so.

If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn't worried that I wasn't improvising.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.