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.

The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

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.

For a while I had a blues band in L.A., but I realized I was too optimistic to play the blues. I did not have the misery in my heart that the blues required.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues...It's called rock now.

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

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.

The amazing thing about Sweets [Edison] was that he exactly spoke the way that he played! He was really unique, the one and only. He was one of the greatest Blues players that I ever heard and played with. Nobody can play like Sweets man, nobody! Most of us, musicians, frequently quote Sweets' phrases in our solos. Like Lester Young, Sweets had a big influence on us musicians, especially when we play some Blues.

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself…In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.

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.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

I am so weak over love and heartbreak. My music is rhythm and blues and with that said, the blues element of it is a major portion. I feel like it has been lost in R&B and a lot of people are scared to talk about their vulnerabilities and insecurities. They want to keep it up and in the club.

There were times I thought I was going to turn to the blues, but then I'd hear better blues players.

When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog-big as a donkey. ... I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio. ... I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere. ... Our repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues, sort of country rhythm and blues, Sonny Terry things.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

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.

The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.

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.

It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.

Just a lot of those bands [like The Blue Jean Committee] started off in blues, and then they all transformed into other kinds.

The blues is a hopeful music. It helps you process something rather than avoid it. It's like mourning, in essence.

I barely notice colors unless I taste them. Not the yellows or the greens. I taste the deeper blues. The darker reds.

Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.

When the sweet talkin's done, a man is a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

'Tailgate Blues' is kind of a lyrical masterpiece of a country song.

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.

The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric's vocals. There's never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.

The blues are real important. It's where most of the hard rock n' roll came from.

I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.

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.

Africa - You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the Hand of God. You watch the slope lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heart, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.

I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock.

Blues teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.

The rhythm persisted, the unfaltering common meter of blues, but the blueness itself, the sorrow, the despair, began to give way to hope.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.

Read books, discover the blues and don't Tweet.

Comedy is the blues for people who can’t sing.

The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support... each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow.

Actor Mike Warren [was my former teammate], who was in Hill Street Blues. There are more, but it's starting to sound like a team reunion at Red Lobster. They were a great bunch of guys and we accomplished a lot together. That's something you don't forget.

When I was growing up, the blues did seem too simple to me. I was just a muso.