Quotes About Blues

I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and he would play the blues.

I began writing with Mike Pinder and eventually we went on to form a new band called The M&B, which later became The Moody Blues, what I would call a progressive blues band.

A guy will promise you the world and give you nothin', and that's the blues.

I didn't want to disrespect my parents, so I never played blues around the house. But I knew then, same as I know today, that I wasn't doing anything wrong. I think that before they died, they both felt very proud of me.

If it wasn't for guys like Gary Moore, I wouldn't exist. He not only proved that the blues could rock but it could draw a crowd as well. All of which made a huge impression on me.

Do I love the road? Honestly? No - but it's how I earn my living. I also don't have the blues, like it's some kind of fever. The blues is my job. It's what I do.

I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.

That's why I loved Dinah Washington. She sung jazz, but they called her the Queen of the Blues. She had the control and sophistication of jazz in her note selection and how to attack a song or certain lines, but then attacked it with a painful force of blues behind it. That's why I admired her so much, because of that versatility.

I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Big time blues and music city. It's always been in my bloodline.

Our repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues, sort of country rhythm and blues, Sonny Terry things.

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.

Quincy and Jake seem to be content to spend an enormous amount of time along together, which I count as romantic, but might simply be because they don't have a child: the Blues versus the world.

I couldn't do no yodelin', so I turned to howlin'. And it's done me just fine.

but a drunk doesn't care about what's been said before, he cares about now and about how he feels, dragging that stuff up is like putting on a good old blues song you've heard a hundred times. You know the words, but it still does you good.

When my bed is empty, Makes me feel awful mean and blue. My springs are getting rusty, Living single like I do.

what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.

Long before any genius producer began singing the blues on an imaginary hill in an unnamed city where a mix of a dozen or so cops came and went in what was known to script writers as "the usual squadroom boil," Cop Hater set the tone and the pattern for a police series in which—so far as I was concerned—there were no restrictions on content or style.

What's so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as they're being gospel and songs of praise, they are also the blues.

I met Paul Kossoff for the first time when I was playing in the back of a pub room in Finsbury Park in London in 1967. It was kind of a blues thing going on, and he came up and said, 'I'd like to have a jam.' So he came up and jammed with me, and I just loved his playing right from the start.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.