Quotes About Blues

Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.

I listen to, like, funky Chicago blues. I love blues, but I love the funky, happy blues. There's a song about pretty much everything, including kidney stones, believe it or not. So there's something there for whatever you happen to be suffering, you know?

See, I have a different type of music from other peoples. They playing the other kind of blues, and I'm playing cotton-patch blues.... Ain't nobody now can play the blues that I play.

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.

I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.

I know that for category purposes, people have to lump certain artists in with genre that they make their name or their bones in. Nobody can tell me that Taj Mahal is pure blues. Nobody can tell me that Mike Bloomfield was pure blues. It was a lot of other things going on as well.

I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

I want to sing using a throatsinging style, like for example kargyraa, but at the same time sing it like a normal way. Maybe I will try some opera. To sing a melody, and to sing not only Tuvan traditional melodies, but I would like to try Western classics, blues. I think Tuvan music and American blues are very close to each other.

The blues is something separate from what I do. They connect at certain spots, but blues is different. I wouldn't put it in with what my career has been. That would be a whole separate wing.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .

Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.

When I discovered blues - I was 12-years-old - I didn't discover it in America where it was from; I discovered it from Fleetwood Mac - the original Peter Green Fleetwood Mac, Saveloy Brown - like British blues interpretations of it,' which then, when I started the liner notes and seeing all these names, I was like, 'Who's Willie Dixon?' Then I go to the record store and ask the guy there and he goes, 'Oh, you don't know anything.' And so, to me, that's the root of most of it anyway.

I know some people will be surprised to hear it, but I've found that my music, whether its blues or rock, or whatever you want to call it, can be channeled into a positive direction that actually helps people.

I didn't get into music to become a blues musician, or a country musician. I'm a singer-songwrit er. In my book that means I get to do whatever I want.

I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.

Got those moods a swinging, tears a slinging, nothing fits me, when it hits me, ranting, raving, misbehaving, PMS blues.

America and Europe are getting closer to each other. In the U.S. you've always had hip - hop, the blues, soul, and rock. For the last decade, there has always been a lot of electronic music in Europe. When I was just at Coachella, I noticed how the music they play there has become electronic, techno, deep house, more European - so I think it's more similar than before.

I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.

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.

Back in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We'd consume them like M&M's, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there's almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens.

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.

I've always loved the blues, ever since I was a kid. It has a depth to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn't have. It has pain and suffering in it, but funny stories, too. And it is built on storytelling, which is something I really love.

In my moments of down time I tend to listen to Blues.

Out of the night you burn, Manhattan, In a vesture of gold-- Spun of innumerable arcs, Flaring and multiplying-- Gold at the uttermost circles fading Into the tenderest hint of jade, Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues, Robing the far-flung offices, Scintillant-storied, forking flame, Or soaring to luminous amethyst Over the steeples aureoled.

There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer.

There was a time when black and navy blue suits were pretty much everything you saw. That has completely changed. People are wearing big checks, checks with browns and blues and shades of gray, and the scale is very large, and some of them are very bold with heavy contrasts.

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Most people say, 'Well, Earl, you sing the blues,' or however they want to categorize it. I just sing songs.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

The blues are three L's - living , loving and hopefully, laughing.

Getting to play the blues has been transcendant for me. I can't say if my finest hour is yet to come, you want to make a dent in this world, well I do anyway.

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.

Blues music is becoming more and more popular than it ever was. I'm always meeting people on the road that are really young, and are guitar players.... male and female.

There's an old blues refrain: I begged for water, you gave me gasoline.

I really don't. I have truly eclectic taste in music and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; World Music, Brit-pop, Classic Rock, Blues/Jazz, even the odd bit of Heavy metal.

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

I'm always on duty, so I tend to wear suits. I've got double-breasted and single-breasted, mostly dark blues and grays. I'm obsessed with them, and I always have been.

Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.

I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

I grew up listening to blues and rock 'n' roll and other music, but, legitimately, the Stones is one of my favorite bands in the world.

If I'm going to do blues, it's going to be a typical Jimmy Rushing record.

I told Bernie Taupin that his best lyrics were for Song For Guy just because it doesn't have any words in it. But there you go... I'm a wind up! But a good Elton song for karaoke is I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues... "laughing like children, living like lovers, rolling like thunder under the covers..." Everyone can join in!

If it ain't about what's real, what's happenin' right now, it ain't the blues.

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow A terrible amber. In the cold streets Your warm body. In whatever room Your warm body. Among all the people Your absence The people who are always Not you. I have been easy with trees Too long. Too familiar with mountains. Joy has been a habit. Now Suddenly This rain.

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.