Quotes About Blues

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 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 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.

Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently.

The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other: all night long. It's not too cold in that bed, and it ain't too hot. But what's the matter? The blues has got you.

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.

Skiffle was blues featuring a washboard and acoustic instruments. It encompassed blues, with elements of folk, jazz, and, at times, American country-and-western music.

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.

You better change your ways / And get really wild. / I want to tell you something / I wouldn't tell you no lie. / Wild women are the only kind / That really get by, / 'Cause Wild Women don't worry / Wild Women don't get the blues.

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.

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 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.

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.

Back in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We'd consume them like M&M's, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there's almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens.

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.

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

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

In this country, particularly, actually in times that are difficult, or from corners of America where you least expect it, unbelievable pure creativity has welled up. Generally because of the cross-fertilization... a Scott Joplin tune becomes jazz, becomes blues, and becomes rock 'n' roll.

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original. ... I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ... I don't need time, I need a deadline. ...There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. ... Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.

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

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

Warm evenings, pale mornings, bottle of blues

Is this really Butte, Montana, or just existential blues?

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

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

Shoe Suede Blues is ten years old this year. The Band consists of four members.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

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

I don't like no fancy chords. Just the boogie. The drive. The feeling. A lot of people play fancy but they don't have no style. It's a deep feeling-you just can't stop listening to that sad blues sound. My sound.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

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

If you've traveled independently through Tibet, Brandon Wilson's Yak Butter Blues will bring back memories...this lively memoir is sure to provide a yak-scented whiff of nostalgia.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.

Asleep by the Smiths Vapour Trail by Ride Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum Dear Prudence by the Beatles Gypsy by Suzanne Vega Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues Daydream by Smashing Pumpkins Dusk by Genesis (before Phil Collins was even in the band!) MLK by U2 Blackbird by the Beatles Landslide by Fleetwood Mac Asleep by the Smiths (again!) -Charlie's mixtape

Zeppelin were a blues band but [also] so much more, [as were] The Stones.

The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed

Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues.

I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.

I'm always on duty, so I tend to wear suits. I've got double-breasted and single-breasted, mostly dark blues and grays. I'm obsessed with them, and I always have been.

Our past as well as our future. It could have been completely destroyed when we were brought to the New World as slaves. They even took away our drums. And I don't want to talk about all those negative things going on. But its music is more present in our lives than ever. Blues, samba, calypso, reggae, jazz, salsa, Africa is everywhere.

What really brought out the voice that I have, my soul voice and true voice, was really not getting any work and being very sad and being poor and having to sit with that. I think that's where the blues comes from.

Wild women don't get the blues.

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.

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

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

Confused by the big city blues, he didn't know who's life he's leading. Put yourself behind the wheel, see if you can get that feel.

Even with Neptune City, I feel like if you strip down all the arrangements, I feel like each of my songs is always going to be, at its core, either a country song or a blues song.