Quotes About Blues

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

All riddles are blues, / And all blues are sad, / And I'm only mentioning / Some blues I've had.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don't worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made 'Three O' Clock Blues,' they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I'm trying to satisfy.

Singing about your sadness unburdens your soul. But the blues hollers shouted about more than being sad. They were also delivering messages in musical code. If the master was coming, you might sing a hidden warning to the other field hands . . . The blues could warn you what was coming. I could see the blues was about survival.

According to Biblical history and all of the history of the world, the blues was built in man from the beginning. The first thing that came out of man is the blues because, according to the Scriptures, when God made man, man was lonesome and blue.

I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

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.

The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.

I would sing the blues if I had the blues.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer, I was born with the blues.

A lot of people wonder, what is the blues? Well, I'm gonna tell you what the blues is.

I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to be in their debt.' They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms but the shadow of the gift goes with it.

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

Janis Joplin sings the blues as hard as any black person.

A lot of people relate me to the blues but I don't think it's a hindrance at this point. I've been doing it long enough that I can do different things and be accepted.

There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.

The blues are just a heightened sense of awareness of life's ups and downs, and things that a guy sees after a couple hits of Jack Daniels.

Blues ain’t football. You don’t have to retire at 30. You can grow and play all your life.

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.

I was born in love with music. My mother is a singer, many of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side are musical, my grandparents sang and played blues piano. It's literally in my blood. My mother wrote an original song to teach me the days of the week.

If you can't play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

When I was about 12, I knew I wanted to be a musician. The blues had so much emotion and so much feeling; if you don't have that, you're not going to be good at it.

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

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.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.

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.

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.

I was born swinging and clapped my hands in church as a little boy, but I've grown up and I like to do things other than just swing. But blues can do more than just swing.

I have a gajillion headbands - yellows, pinks, reds, blues. I'm obsessed.

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

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.

The idea of a hypnotic riff as the prime mover of a piece of music has been around for a long time, whether you're talking about the Delta blues or music from Middle Eastern and African cultures.

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

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

Rock'n'roll is nothing but Boogie Woogie with stuff on top of it. And if you're black, they name it rhythm'n'blues, and if you're white, they name it rock'n'roll. So, I don't give a... You know.

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.

You bat your baby blues at tall, dark, and gruesome, and next thing you know, he's trailing you like a lost puppy.

The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future.

I've been on a real Credence Clearwater kick. I've been collecting their albums on CD -- right now I really like 'I Put a Spell on You.' I don't know who actually wrote it; it might be a traditional, or like, an old blues song, I haven't looked in the liner notes, but it's the first song on their first album. I love all the hits; I mean @#$%&, I like every one of them. I think my favorite song by John Fogerty is 'Have You Ever Seen the Rain?' They're my favorite American band of all time, totally.

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

Catch a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain. Wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone... The blues are all the same.

The Progressive Blues Experiment, Johnny Winter... and Still Alive and Well is my favorite rock record

The white music was melodic and pretty, and you had beautiful women's voices like Gogi Grant and even the Andrews Sisters. Then I went directly to rhythm and blues, which had beautiful voices but not much melody in particular and pretty much the same chord pattern. I loved it, I was entrenched in it, but then folk music came in the middle of that for me, and made its own path. And it was part of the rebellion against bubblegum music, or music that is pretty but doesn't say anything.