Quotes About Blues

The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

Now what's to be found by racing around You carry your pain wherever you go Full of blues, and trying to lose You ain't gonna learn what you don't wanna know

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to make a blues record.

Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.

'Hairdresser Blues' was written when I was deep in a ten-year depression that I escaped shortly after recording that album. I don't like that album.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

Rhythm and blues started even before phonograph records were being produced because black people entertained themselves. It wasn't done for money. It was done for entertainment. Most white people didn't know anything about this because prejudice kept them from ever seeing what was going on.

I cut all my early records in Nashville, so I guess that makes me country. I call it country pop, but my love of the blues is in there, too.

Ever since I was a little kid and first heard Jimmy Reed's 'Honey, Don't Let Me Go,' the blues has been in my blood.

I got to see all these incredible blues players, like Jimmy Reed.

I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.

When I began my career, I was constantly referred to as the kid who could play the blues.

When I was growing up, I would go hang out with older guys at night in blues clubs.

What did we play in the Harry Dean Stanton Band? It was old blues and country - all covers. I never wrote anything.

I think you can hear the Delta blues thing in something like the intro to 'Heaven in This Hell,' which has that down-home acoustic riff.

To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.

I don't even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.

For a musician to be good, he has to have humanity and care about the other guy. And as for blues - in a sense, black people have kept this country alive and given us our entire musical heritage.

I listen to lots of blues records and some of them are funny. BB King's 'How Blue Can You Get' is hilarious.

You know, I really feel a responsibility to the music, and I teach workshops in music sometimes. And folks do come to me and they go, 'How do I make this blues song my own? How do I feel like I'm not an impostor doing this?' And I'm like, 'That's an excellent question.' That's where you should start, where you go, 'How does this speak to me?'

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.

I played with Eddie Taylor's son, Tim Taylor and Carey Bells son Lurie Bell.

Particularly with the blues, it's not just about bad times. It's about the healing spirit.