Quotes About Blues

After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues.

There was a time when I had the blues - I mean I really had it bad. I couldn't pay my light bill and I couldn't pay my rent and I really had the blues. But today I can pay my rent and I can pay the light bill and I still got the blues. So I must been born with 'em... That's my religion - the blues is my religion.

The blues brings you back into the fold. The blues isn't about the blues, it's about we have all had the blues and we are all in this together.

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

To me, the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing; the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful, sorrowful thing. It's more reflective; it reminds you to feel.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of 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'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.

The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.

Blues is not a dream, blues is truth.

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

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

There are many influences in my music, not only blues. R&B, Motown, gospel, old timey, jazz, even classical are all part of what I do. I started with classical, then country, then blues, and after that I started listening heavily to Motown and gospel. My earliest efforts as a songwriter were soul. Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Fontella Bass are just a few of the names that come to mind as the God's of soul and Motown.

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

Rock & roll seemed to just come to us, on the radio and in the record stores. It became our music. . . But then we uncovered another, deeper level, the history behind rock and R&B, the music behind our music. All roads led to the source, which was the blues.

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.

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

Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic 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.

Benny [Carter] opened the eyes of a lot of producers and studios, so that they could understand that you could go to blacks for other things outside of blues and barbecue. He's a total musician. He was the pioneer, he was the foundation. He made it possible for that doubt to be taken away.

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

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

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

You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues...And you know it don't come easy.

Blues was made for the recessed.

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.

I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base.

The blues - the sound of a sinner on revival day.

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

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.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.

A little bit South you've got Macon, Georgia - home of the Allman Brothers, the Marshall Tucker Band and Capricorn Records. And off to west you've got Delta blues. Sprinkle Southern gospel over the top of that, and you're talking about where I came from. I loved all of that music.

I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.

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.

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

I was into playing American music, especially the blues.

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

You don't need the frills and thrills to make something amazing. I think that's what inspires me with the blues.

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.

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.

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

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

As I got older though I wanted a life of my own. The classical training was very demanding and thorough. It was a very sheltered existence. Even though I heard blues and gospel on the radio sometimes, it was always back to the piano and study and give recitals.

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.