Quotes About Blues

The blues? Why, the blues are a part of me. They're like a chant. The blues are like spirituals, almost sacred. When we sing blues, we're singing out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues. When I sing, 'I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry -- Yes, I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry,'... what I'm doing is letting my soul out.

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.

For a while I had a blues band in L.A., but I realized I was too optimistic to play the blues. I did not have the misery in my heart that the blues required.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues...It's called rock now.

I'm not a jazz singer, blues singer or country singer. I'm a singer that can sing rhythm & blues, that can sing jazz, that can sing country. There's a big difference. In other words, I'm not a specialist.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

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.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

But of course it's different now, the blues is no longer blues, it's green now.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

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

I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. Its cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. Its not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.

A lot of people wonder, what is the blues? Well, I'm gonna tell you what the blues is.

When the slaves left Africa, they left us this music. They left us blues.

As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

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.

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

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 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.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

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'.

When the sweet talkin's done, a man is a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.

I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

We had a missionary zeal about blues music, and I felt, particularly, that Mickie Most was attempting to homogenize, sweeten, and make it accessible for the mass market. Which is understandable if you're the producer, but aggravating if you're the artist.

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

Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.

Humor is most powerful thing that uses laughter as it base to chase your blues away.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

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.

That's where my influences lie, in the blues with people like Muddy Waters and Tina Turner. At first I didn't really like the idea of working with synthesizers but now I think they're fun, there are no restrictions. Not that I understand how they work.

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

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

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

All music is the blues. All of it.

I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

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

The white music was melodic and pretty, and you had beautiful women's voices like Gogi Grant and even the Andrews Sisters. Then I went directly to rhythm and blues, which had beautiful voices but not much melody in particular and pretty much the same chord pattern. I loved it, I was entrenched in it, but then folk music came in the middle of that for me, and made its own path. And it was part of the rebellion against bubblegum music, or music that is pretty but doesn't say anything.

I grew up listening to blues and rock 'n' roll and other music, but, legitimately, the Stones is one of my favorite bands in the world.

If I'm going to do blues, it's going to be a typical Jimmy Rushing record.

In blues music, there's a lot of borrowing, so it's often difficult to identify the originator of a song.

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

Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.

It was always going to be a blues, soul, and rock-'n'-roll thing, because those are our ingredients. That's where we come from, and that's how we write. I think it has just become larger. We've just been able to use our imaginations so much more.

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.