Quotes About Blues

I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.

People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow...The blues is about truth-telling.

It's no doubt that there's a connection (between the blues and hip-hop). Hip-hop is definitely a child of the blues. And I think you gotta know the roots to really grow. It's like knowing your parents, it's like knowing your culture, so you could be proud of that culture and take it to the world.

The early years when I was starting, blues player, you wasn't always welcome in a lot of the other places. People usually have preconceived ideas about blues music. They always feel that it's depressing and that it's just something that a guy sit out on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever.

Here, in the US, people like our music because it's very similar to blues. It's the same thing in Europe. Everyone listens to blues and rock, it's universal. Everyone dances.

The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people. ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.

Blues artists now try and stay in a box. Back in the day at all the clubs you would see James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, The Isley Brothers, Little Richard and Etta James all play the same venues. It was a mix of funk, soul, blues and rock 'n' roll.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers... synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records... The roots of rock'n'roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.

All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.

This is something I think that blues music, or folk music, and all those particular genres that have a perspective about life deal with - where the difficulties of life are seen as something that are very natural and nothing to be embarrassed about, and something that we all go through; something that's part of our share of humanity. And it accepts those difficulties and pain as such. I think there's a wonderful forgiveness that can come over you, if you have that perspective on it.

My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.

In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

The Rock'n'Blues Fest is my kind of festival series! It's always great playing shows with my brother and, add to that, all the other great artists and their bands and this should make for one historic round of concerts.

Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.

Spring is the fresh green of young corn and the pink blush of blossoms. Autumn contrasts the yellowed foilage with violet hues. Winter is the white of snow against its black forms ... Summer is the contrast of blues and the golden bronze of the corn.

I like to play guitar, jam out, play the blues, go watch movies. I love movies.

I love eye makeup. I really like doing a cat eye, playing with liquid liners and different colors of liners, like emerald and deep blues, combining them with black.

I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.

I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.

I guess that's why they call it the blues, time on my hands could be time spent with you.

Rock & Roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don't understand. The music gave you back the beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass...The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn't it pretty? Wouldn't you die for something pretty?Perhaps I should die. After all, all the great blues singers did die. But life is getting better now.I don't want to die. Do I? - Lou Reed (1965-1968)

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

Blues songs, like folk songs, are a continuous stream, and catching the continuities and thefts is part of what puts meaning and complexity into it - also part of the fun of it all.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.

I'm sure there are a few things in my CD collection that might surprise people. I like classical music, the blues, and I'm a big fan of alternative rock.

At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time.

I've never been an all-black girl. I like pinks and blues and greens. If you come over to my closet, you'll be able to find a rainbow of things to wear.

I don't like no fancy chords. Just the boogie. The drive. The feeling. A lot of people play fancy but they don't have no style. It's a deep feeling-you just can't stop listening to that sad blues sound. My sound.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good - he's rock's #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us

The blues - it's kind of like a religion, really.

In my late teens, early 20s, when I started stand-up and I was living downtown for the first time, I was deep into my blues and Bukowski phase. And, you know, that's when that's appropriate. And I grew out of it.

If you look at the other singers of Billie Holiday's time, they were really trying to entertain. They were trying to make people feel good. They were singing fast - and she was singing the blues.

Up north, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials that played pre-rock 'n' roll things - country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin' Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn't even know where Alabama was.

The blues is life itself.

When I got a little bit older I wanted to play piano - that's all I wanted to do. I remember learning how to play a blues progression on the xylophone in music class and thinking "This is the greatest thing I've ever learned."

The blues are what I've turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.

My take on rap is driven by straightforward American southern rock and blues.

My guitar is my torch, my soul carries the flame. Make no mistake, I'm a true blues man.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

Confused by the big city blues, he didn't know who's life he's leading. Put yourself behind the wheel, see if you can get that feel.

It was always going to be a blues, soul, and rock-'n'-roll thing, because those are our ingredients. That's where we come from, and that's how we write. I think it has just become larger. We've just been able to use our imaginations so much more.

You don't need the frills and thrills to make something amazing. I think that's what inspires me with the blues.

There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. 'Isn't it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?' I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. 'Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.'