Quotes About Blues

There are happy blues, sad blues, lonesome blues, red-hot blues, mad blues, and loving blues. Blues is a testimony to the fullness of life.

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.

Theres no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, Im playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.

The whole of life itself expresses the blues. That's why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding. The blues can be about anything pertaining to the facts of life. The blues call on God as much as a spiritual song do.

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.

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

It's no doubt that there's a connection (between the blues and hip-hop). Hip-hop is definitely a child of the blues. And I think you gotta know the roots to really grow. It's like knowing your parents, it's like knowing your culture, so you could be proud of that culture and take it to the world.

Shoe Suede Blues opened for the Monkees in the 1997 reunion tour for two shows. I went out in disguise when I played with Shoe Suede Blues.

Blues is not a dream, blues is truth.

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?

I like blues but it is music I am too ignorant to understand.

Being materialistic is part of the hip-hop community's nature, because jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll, when they started out in the urban communities, were about the American Dream, and the lack of opportunity in that structure. So they talked about everything - uplifting and getting what is perceived as success in America.

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.

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

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

I like to listen the blues and some classical.

I remember listening to like gospel-y blues tunes. I'd just listen to the rhythm and the music was upbeat. Always upbeat if you get like a good rhythm you can nod your head. You just feel good. But then when you listen to the lyrics it was quite sad.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

I guess that's why they call it the blues, time on my hands could be time spent with you.

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.

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

Wouldn't you be mad if I told you to give up on someone you cared about? Just... hand her over to someone who doesn't even deserve her?" Tod gave me a strange, sad look I couldn't interpret, and the blues in his irises shifted subtly for a moment before he got control of them. "Yeah. I guess I would.

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

Inside the museum infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo, 'This is what salvation must be like after a while.' But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.

I had to shoot shotguns for The Blues Brothers. But I don't like that stuff. Too butch for me.

Ain't but one kind of blues and that consists of a male and female that's in love.

My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.

In my late teens, early 20s, when I started stand-up and I was living downtown for the first time, I was deep into my blues and Bukowski phase. And, you know, that's when that's appropriate. And I grew out of it.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

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.

There are only two kinds of songs; there's the blues, and there's zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

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

Being a blues singer is like being black two times.

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.

I finally learned to accept that I can't make radio play blues any more than I could get Reagan out of the White House.

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

If there is a blues song, it just goes in one ear and out the other. But other than that, if it stays with you and when we are all 90, we're going to look back at those songs, and it's going to be emotional. And when someone plays it, and you know it, and you're going to go, "I know that song and I love it."

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.

When I got a little bit older I wanted to play piano - that's all I wanted to do. I remember learning how to play a blues progression on the xylophone in music class and thinking "This is the greatest thing I've ever learned."

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" [of Bob Dylan] captures, in word-salad format, life in an encroaching police state.

I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simply blues.

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

I was so used to doing old blues licks with the first three fingers. When I started using my pinky and finding more spread things, that's when I started getting my own style.

If it ain't about what's real, what's happenin' right now, it ain't 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.

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