Quotes About Blues

I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.

I really wanted to be a blues/jazz/gospel singer, but times had changed and disco was now the music - the new sound. I embraced it with all my heart and the rest is history.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

I'm a big, big blues fan and the last several years I've really invested in the blues a lot, and I think my playing is getting better because of it - not necessarily better on a technical level, but certainly on a level of appropriateness.

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

My dad was good friends with the Bad Medicine Blues Band - one of the only blues bands in Fargo, as you can imagine! He took me out to see them play when I was 12 years old and I was really inspired by their guitar player, Ted Larsen.

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.

I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.

By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.

But the blues is a more sustained illumination, against the humiliation, rage, and sadness of life, and in turn invests the artist with not eternal youth but a scarred mortality, blessed with poetry.

Allen Ginsberg had the idea that the image in a blues refrain was the American haiku.

They say that you need to ride the rails for a while to understand the traveling blues. They're wrong. To understand the traveling blues you need to be locked down somewhere. In a cell. Or in the army. Someplace where you're caged. Someplace where smokestack lightning looks like a faraway beacon of impossible freedom.

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

It is secular spiritual music, the gospel blues. It's music from the heart instead of the head.

Little Walter was the best harmonica player I ever heard in my life.

Blues ain't football. You don't have to retire at 30. You can grow and play all your life.

The blues are what I've turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

I'm just a simple guy, I live from day to day. A ray of sunshine melts my frown and blows my blues away.

Gentlemen are so trying! We shall forget them and visit the milliner. A new bonnet will banish the blues as nothing else.

She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.