Quotations About "The Blues"
"Simple music is the hardest music to play and blues is simple music."
"Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed."
"Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family."
"I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society."
"The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters. "
"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."
"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you."
"Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning."
"It's going to be years and years before most people realize how greatly he contributed to American music."
Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things.
"My guitar is my torch, my soul carries the flame. Make no mistake, I'm a true blues man.
Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
"Pinetop could find the cracks and fill them in and be the glue and mortar of the whole band."
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.
The Blues is Life.
"Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people."
Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'
"I've never missed a gig yet. Music makes people happy, and that's why I go on doing it - I like to see everybody smile."
"Listen to the lyrics - we're singing about everyday life: rich people trying to keep money, poor people tying to get it, and everyone having trouble with their husband or wife!"
"Big Maybelle was my favorite. Do you know she cried REAL TEARS in EVERY performance!"
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
"I still like to play the blues more than anything else. "
"Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues. "
"No one could match Howlin' Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits."
"I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet."