Quotes About Music

virtually all southern rural music shows signs of Afro-European interchange.

the shift from banjo to guitar played a significant role in the rise of blues: Banjos have very fast sound decay, which means that one has to play relatively quickly and cannot mimic the drawn-out contours of a vocal performance. The guitar has greater sustain, making it more appropriate for slow songs, and also has a warmer tone, making it more suitable for accompanying sentimental ballads or moaning hollers.

Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, "The blues ain't nothing but a low-down, aching chill.

Ida Cox, sang that the blues was nothing but "your lover on your mind" and "a slow aching heart disease.

The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.

However hallowed by history, though, the idea that blues is fundamentally a musical heart-cry has some problems. For one thing, along with some of the most moving, cathartic music on earth, the American blues tradition has produced thousands of comical party songs and upbeat dance music.

the first published blues was a song called "I Got the Blues," which appeared in New Orleans in 1908. Its composer was an Italian American named Antonio Maggio, and it began with a twelve-bar section using a melody that is a clear predecessor of W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues.

There is also a purely musical definition of blues: a progression of chords consisting of four bars of the tonic (I), two bars of the subdominant (IV), two bars of the tonic (I), a bar of the dominant seventh (V7), a bar of the subdominant (IV), and two final bars of the tonic (I).

We were learning firsthand that the so-called national 'folk boom' had more to do with celebrity than with any deep grassroots interest.

Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as "Crazy Blues.

His most influential song, "Matchbox Blues," popularized an image that had first appeared in one of Rainey's lyrics and would be recycled by everyone from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Carl Perkins, and the Beatles: "I'm sitting here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes / I ain't got so many matches, but I've got so far to go.

And then there was Ray Charles.

jukeboxes—industry estimates suggest that up to half of all the records sold in the United States in the later 1930s went into commercial music machines—and the early electric speakers were particularly suited to the percussive power of a piano.

First you love the music that your parents love—and then, later in life, you love the songs your kids love.

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures:——but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm.

Extreme excellence in music is liable to yet stronger objections; to attain it, almost every other accomplishment must be neglected; and, when attained, it leads to an improper degree of intimacy with professional people. Music softens the mind—and if a master and his pupil are continually together, bad consequence may ensure: nevertheless, I would have you know and love music; but I would not have you doat upon it.

With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.

I like to listen to sad music when I'm sad. It seems honest. It makes me cry, and sometimes a good cry is the only thing that can make you feel better.

John strums the guitar and begins to sing, "When I die / don't put me in the ground / Put my ashes in the ashtray / and drive me around." He sings the word around like James Taylor does, with a long a. Iris laughs. "Did you write that?" "Nope. A genius songwriter named Warren Nelson wrote that.

Birds are everywhere, singing their hearts out every morning, including a bachelor mockingbird, who courts the ladies with his playlist of imitative calls.

And for heaven's sake don't play Bach," ordered Randy. "It's so jumpy for today." Rush

Music is nothing more than decoration for the imagination. That

He and I had been talking about jazz (which is to say that he had been talking about jazz, and I had been listening to him talk about jazz, because that is how you talk to a man about jazz)

There are songs, Waits says, that simply will not allow themselves to be born, and that will hold up the recording of an entire album.