Quotes About Blues

Mick Jagger has been an idol of mine since I was 10 years old. Through his music, he has taught me so much about rock n' roll, but also about the blues and about the experience of live music, going to several Rolling Stones shows, growing up.

I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.

I know some people will be surprised to hear it, but I've found that my music, whether its blues or rock, or whatever you want to call it, can be channeled into a positive direction that actually helps people.

You got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues...And you know it don't come easy.

I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to be in their debt.' They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms but the shadow of the gift goes with it.

I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

I realized I was tired of singing about trees and flowers. I wanted to sing about real life. From then on, nobody could tell me anything was better than blues.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.

I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.

Just 'cause you're black folks think you lack,They laugh at you and scorn you too,What did I do to be so black and blue?

I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.

The strange thing is I can't play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.

You can go to Europe, and there's no turnin' back - any parts of Europe. Wherever you are, there is no stop and go for the blues. The blues go but it don't stop.

I think every once in a while country has lost its way, but found its way back. It's always going to drift away from the traditional side, but then find a way to return. There's room for all kinds of influences be it pop, blues, gospel or whatever. But I will always say that I think we need more traditional country music coming down the pike.

That's where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I've failed: They've actually convinced college kids that they're listening to hip music - but it's just blues twisted a new way - while I'm playing for the college kid's parents.

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 finally learned to accept that I can't make radio play blues any more than I could get Reagan out of the White House.

The R&B will always prevail. It will always last. The blues will always last.

Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of.

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

AC/DC is a prime example of taking that blues rock thing and just living in that world. They only really move the furniture around a little on each album, but it still works.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.

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