Quotes About Music

I was raised in a mostly white neighborhood. I was this little white girl jamming out to Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Brown.

White artists have made millions of dollars off music they stole from black artists. I don't blame all the white artists. I'm a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, and he was always very gracious about where he learned his music. But a lot of the time, you'd think the white guys thought it up. Hey, hasn't anyone heard of Muddy Waters?

If I were not a black artist but I was still singing, playing guitar, and singing ballads that are spiritual and cerebral, I'd be easier to market because people accept that from white female singer-songwriters faster.

The Jam went through a phase of wearing satin jackets. But that was pre-getting signed and making it, when we were still playing the pubs and clubs - around '75. Shocking, really - what would you call them apart from 'horrible?' We'd wear these white zip-up bomber jackets with black kind of loon pants and black and white shoes.

Playing drums feels like coming home for me. Even during the White Stripes I thought: 'I'll do this for now, but I'm really a drummer.' That's what I'll put on my passport application.

We met Ferg at one of our shows in L.A. She gave us her number. For the song 'Shut Up' on Elephunk, we needed a vocalist. Someone said 'yo, remember that white girl - we should get her in the studio.' Since then, we've become friends. She's one of the guys now, she isn't just a girl.

I want my music to sound good on whatever people are listening - laptop speakers, those crappy little white ones you get with your PC.

Music, in its true essence, has got no language. You don't listen to anybody because he is black or white or because he belongs to a particular geographical region. You listen to him because you like what he does.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.

I use to live on this street when I was a kid where there was an old person retirement home, and all of the old people would listen to that band Herman's Hermits, and they would wear white nursing shoes. And they would throw away stacks of VHS tapes, and I would go through the trash and take them.

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.

My mom bought me a white Strat, but that wasn't what I wanted, so I went to a guitar store in Cleveland and - the guy told me it was a really good deal - made an even swap for a blue Teisco Del Ray. I loved that guitar and used it a bunch.

Had I been pushed like Colonel Parker pushed Elvis, had I been a white boy like Elvis, sure, it would have been different.

The first time I heard 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais,' I loved the vulnerability in the music and the lyrics.

You don't hear that much about me being a white and singing soul music in England, but I get the feeling that in America it's really a big thing. It's like, 'God, look at the color of her skin.'

The only thing that's really riled me up in the last ten years has been the White Stripes. That's the one band that's gotten me competitive, and that's good.

I can't take any more white boys noodling around on their guitars.

Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.

As far as I'm concerned, the stakes are always very high. Whether it's playing at the White House or playing for a group in my own house - you know, one of those soirees I play in. Once I start playing, the stakes are somehow higher, in a way, than any of the context.

One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else.

It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the '80s by accident - a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.

The first song that made me interested in music was 'Oh, Pretty Woman' by Roy Orbison. It was the guitar intro, that riff, that I really liked and made me listen in a different way.

It's a bummer sometimes but I always believe that great bands and great music always prevail.