Quotes About 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.

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned.

In the same way I wanted to learn how to play poker, I've always kind of been into the blues. It just seems like a cool thing, but I didn't know much about it. So I thought, 'Hey, let's really learn about the blues.'

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

In the blues, it just takes so long for us to get recognized.

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.

They say the blues is sad, but when B.B. sings 'I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings,' that don't sound too sad to me!

My doors enter from the sidestreet, my windows painted basement black, my mouth kisses the blues harp, my heart hides like notes locked in a cedar chest.

The truth is that Robert Johnson wrestled a superb art out of the blues tradition, an art that has appealed to generations of both black and white listeners, an art that is an essential element of the ongoing progression that is the freedom principle in operation. Forget the context, the mysteries, and the lies; those twenty-nine masters represent artistic truth.

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.

So I went out and bought Hard Again by Muddy Waters. That was a big learning curve. I listened to that album again and again and again. James Cotton was the harmonica player on that album.

Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.

Written on the wall behind them was: 'Blues for the body, food for the soul.

Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can't make friends with grief, you've got to at least make way for it.

You still taking dance classes?" "No, Aiden. Mama said it's like teaching a cow to sing the blues. No one wants to see it, no one wants to hear it, and it's embarrassing to the cow.

I've always found a cure for the blues is wandering into something unknown, and resting there, before coming back to whatever weight you were carrying.

It's true that when I was younger and I first got interested in music, I used to read books about the Stones and the Beatles and how they listened to Muddy Waters and people like that when they were starting out, who are much less well known now than the Rolling Stones. The Stones really changed blues.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

When I was 15, if anything, I thought I was going to be a Delta bluesman, which is so ridiculous.

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.

In the late '70s, I had a band - the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name - and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.

We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.