Quotes About Blues

My musical education was grounded in blues and Chicago blues - John Lee Hooker and Otis Redding.

I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist.

I'm not committed to putting myself up for a blues guitarist, even though I love playing the blues.

I wouldn't count myself as being a true blues guitarist because I feel you have to live it.

Having pop sensibilities from my past and also being a lead blues and sort of rock guitarist allowed me to bring that kind of beachy rock groove.

Mingus had always known that that was what the blues was: music played to the dead, calling them back, showing them the way back to the living. Now he realized part of the blues was the opposite of that: the desire to be dead yourself, a way of helping the living find the dead.

Maybe all exiles are drawn to the sea, the ocean. There is an inherent music in the working sounds of docks and harbors and there were times when he thought that all the melancholy beauty of the blues was present in a foghorn, wailing out to sea, warning men of the dangers that awaited them. Increasingly

I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.

All music is the blues. All of it.

When I got out of high school, I joined a local blues band in Philadelphia - Woody's Truck Stop.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.

The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.

I think once I had lived life, once I had failed enough in this lifetime and got back up a thousand times from failing, I really connected to the blues.

I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.

When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.

I was 17, and it was my first summer in London as a professional singer. One hot, humid evening, I heard that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing in a blues club above a pub in Finsbury Park. I was flat broke and couldn't afford a ticket, so I went along just to stand outside and listen.

Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'

Blind Willie Johnson. 'Dark Was the Night.

The idea of a hypnotic riff as the prime mover of a piece of music has been around for a long time, whether you're talking about the Delta blues or music from Middle Eastern and African cultures.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well-known blues musicians.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.

Moment by moment, in life's winter life frozeEchoing a history of blues, a milestone rose