Quotes About Blues

Colours change: in the morning light, red shines out bright and clear and the blues merge into their surroundings, melting into the greens; but by the evening the reds loose their piquancy, embracing a quieter tone and shifting toward the blues in the rainbow. Yellow flowers remain bright, and white ones become luminous, shining like ghostly figures against a darkening green background.

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

I'm a big, big blues fan and the last several years I've really invested in the blues a lot, and I think my playing is getting better because of it - not necessarily better on a technical level, but certainly on a level of appropriateness.

See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.

Gary Burnetts office is shelved with theological books, guitars fill the floor, and the drawers are crammed with CDs. In The Gospel According to the Blues, Gary brings his vocation as a New Testament teacher together with his passion for the blues and gives the reader scholarly knowledge and wise insight.

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.

If I'm at a party and someone puts on a Blues Brothers tape, I tend to go nuts.

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

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.

I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.

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

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

I visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded. I ran into `out-to-lunch' free jazz, and the notion that groove was old-fashioned. All around the United States, I could see jazz becoming linear, a horn-player's world. It made me realize that we were not jazz musicians; we were territory musicians in love with all forms of African-American music. All of the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz.

The blues is a low down achin' chill.

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

Warm evenings, pale mornings, bottle of blues

It's a losing proposition, but one you can't refuse. It's the politics of contraband, it's the smuggler's blues.

If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.

A guy will promise you the world and give you nothin', and that's the blues.

If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.

I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you're young, it's hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.

When I was 12 years old, or however old I was when Bringing It All Back Home came out, I'd just skip back and forth endlessly between 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'It's Alright, Ma' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' and now my Bob Dylan roots are showing big time.

The rhythm persisted, the unfaltering common meter of blues, but the blueness itself, the sorrow, the despair, began to give way to hope.

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.

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

The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity

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.

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

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.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was into playing American music, especially the blues.

Isn't my music the last of the real rhythm and blues? Isn't it great? It's because of my musicians, we were weaned on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the founding fathers, the gods of thunder, who invented the foundation and the pulse of the greatest music in the world!

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

I think a guy who's had just the right amount of booze can sing the blues a hell of a lot better than a guy who is stone sober.

I think every once in a while country has lost its way, but found its way back. It's always going to drift away from the traditional side, but then find a way to return. There's room for all kinds of influences be it pop, blues, gospel or whatever. But I will always say that I think we need more traditional country music coming down the pike.

I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

I'm certain that it was an incredible gift for me to not only be friends with some of the greatest blues people who've ever lived, but to learn how they played, how they sang, how they lived their lives, ran their marriages, and talked to their kids.

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.

There's a more experimental album that follows that, which is like Black Magic and While You Were Sleeping. Then there's a return to jazz, For All We Know and Yesterday I Sang The Blues. It wasn't like a planned thing, I just kind of realized it when I made a list of my albums. Like, oh wow, this is exactly what I did before.

Before I left, I opened a lot of doors for a lot of people to play the blues.

I know whites buy more records than blacks. So, I wanted to be able to make the most money that I could. Pop is for both whites and blacks, but if I just stuck to rhythm and blues, it's mostly for blacks. I didn't want to do that. So like I said, I wanted to get the most out of it that I could, so I thought that pop was the way to go.

All the blues greats took chances and developed their own style. They didn't copy.