Quotes About Blues

A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.

The early Stones were adolescent rockers. They were self-conscious in an obvious and unpretentious way. And they were committed to a musical style that needed no justification because it came so naturally to them. As they grew musically the mere repetition of old rock and blues tunes became increasingly less satisfying.

When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street - you live in Time Square, you know how they do it - they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

I had listened to Joe Turner. When they'd book Joe there, I'd play the blues behind him.

The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

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.

I've been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

I don't want to be in some big beautiful place that nobody want me, because I play the blues.

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.

In blues music, there's a lot of borrowing, so it's often difficult to identify the originator of a song.

Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

To me, the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing; the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful, sorrowful thing. It's more reflective; it reminds you to feel.

Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don't know what I'm sorry about. I don't.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

But I'm really into old music - bluesy, soulful singers, like Etta James, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. I wouldn't have minded being born in the 1960s!

The blues - the sound of a sinner on revival day.

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.

Eric Clapton was such a great player. He sounds like he's Freddie King or someone like that. He plays the roots of blues and Delta blues. He really affected me with the way that he plays, because he never really plays that many notes.

Lonnie was ahead of his time, but at the same time he was right in there with Albert Collins's Cool Sounds.