Quotes About Blues

I have heartaches, I have blues. No matter what you got, the blues is there. 'Cause that's all I know - the blues. And I can sing the blues so deep until you can have this room full of money and I can give you the blues.

I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.

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.

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.

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 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.

When you think of blues, all you think about is crying guitar like B.B. King's guitar. You think about someone crying that their woman's gone. And how bad life is and all that. Why can't it be something happy with the blues? Why can't it have a hip-hop beat to which you can do the dances of today?

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.

Our repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues, sort of country rhythm and blues, Sonny Terry things.

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.

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.

When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.

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.

When I began my career, I was constantly referred to as the kid who could play the blues.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

I think if it wasn't for the blues, there wouldn't be no jazz.

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.

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

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.

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

In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.

I tend to prefer the band thing. I think playing solo is good for about 45 minutes. I remember when I was on my solo tour that I got a chance to play with Martin Stephenson of the Daintees. He's now refashioned himself as almost a delta blues guitar player and he's got all the technique, all the persona and the charisma on stage. I think I do too, but I'm more of a first position strummer guy with a little bit of filigree work. I could listen to him for hours; I could listen to myself playing solo for about half an hour!

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

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

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

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

It is secular spiritual music, the gospel blues. It's music from the heart instead of the head.

Well, people who are blues purist types are usually the most vocal and the ones that pop up on the websites.

It started so early, it all runs together. But what made a huge impact on me was when I went to Europe at 15 or 16 years old. All I knew before that was music on the radio and TV. When I went over there I realized there are all different levels of music. There are people who do blues, jazz, classical, working in film, TV and all kinds of places. You might not see them on MTV but there are lots of needs and uses and opportunities for all kinds of music.

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

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

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.

The fact I wasn't getting off made me realize that I really had to take a hard look at it and at the type of music that I played, which ranges from ballads to country type stuff to rock and rhythm 'n' blues. It takes in a wider spectrum.

Wild women don't get the blues.

The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me.

If a slave were to raise his voice to his master, he risked all manner of punishment. Yet what was possible in many circumstances was to lift one's voice in song. This was a major ingredient in what is now known as blues and gospel. Slaves may have been regarded as subhuman by their cruel captors, but through music, they were proud and dignified.

Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride/ You will not die, its not poison -Tombstone Blues

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

If you can play the blues, you can do anything.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.

The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from . . . the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

Ive always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.