Quotes About Blues

Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.

I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working.

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.

Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.

I think blues music is music of the soul. Of course, there are other forms. You could call some classical music blues music in that way.

I never had the blues; the blues always had me.

People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be 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.

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

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.

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

These is old blues / and I sing em like any woman do. / These the old blues / and I sing em, sing em, sing em. Just like any woman do. / My life ain't done yet. / Naw. My song ain't through.

The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.

My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.

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.

If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.

So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.

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

I visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded. I ran into `out-to-lunch' free jazz, and the notion that groove was old-fashioned. All around the United States, I could see jazz becoming linear, a horn-player's world. It made me realize that we were not jazz musicians; we were territory musicians in love with all forms of African-American music. All of the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz.

You can't overthink the music. Mood and intensity can't be manufactured. The blues isn't about structure; it's what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.

The blues he sends to meet me, won't defeat me. It won't be long til happiness steps up to greet me.

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.

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

And a lot of the technique and the little T-Bone phrases that define his style, Chuck Berry, when he rearranged the beat, they became rock 'n roll guitar licks. So in essence, T-Bone was not only the first electric blues guitar player, but he was the first electric rock 'n roll guitar player, really.

A guy will promise you the world and give you nothin', and that's the blues.

I wanted to know everything about the blues. I think it constantly changes for me.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I was addicted to rhythm 'n' blues pretty much directly into folk music. I had my little 45s of mostly black artists. That was as close as I got. I've never listened to heavy rock or stuff that jangles my nerves, because I'm already jangled.

When you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on.

For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am. And that's why, when I say I'm a blues man, that's a very serious vocation - to muster the courage to find your own unique voice, to forge your distinctive style in the world, to leave your imprint in the sands of time in such a way that your singularity, your individuality, remains something that people have to come to terms with.

The blues is life itself.

If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money.

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.

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.

I was pissed off about a lot of things...so much shitty rock ’n’ roll that angered me, and Pussy Galore was kicking against that. With the Blues Explosion, there was some of that, but now I was into celebrating it.

People that can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

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!

I was into playing American music, especially the blues.

Isn't my music the last of the real rhythm and blues? Isn't it great? It's because of my musicians, we were weaned on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the founding fathers, the gods of thunder, who invented the foundation and the pulse of the greatest music in the world!

But between sets I'd sneak over to the black places to hear blues musicians. It got to the point where I was making my living at white clubs and having my fun at the other places.

God, I'm just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?

I was singing when I was five years old. My sister and I both had the talent from mom and dad, and she was in opera and I was into pop and uh, rhythm and blues, anything, I was about a four octave singer.

My musical taste has always been wide. I started out as a folky before I moved on to blues and soul.

The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.

I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof.