Quotes About Blues

To me, blues is more of a feel and a vibe, rather than sitting there and saying, 'Well, I'm gonna play bluesy now.'

I had hooked up my iPod to the speakers. The air was filled with the raw, sexy purr of Etta James. "The thing that's great about the blues," I told Luke, pausing to sip from my glass of wine, "is that it's about feeling, loving, wanting without the brakes on. No one's brave enough to live that way. Except maybe musicians.

My mama used to say the blues is an ailment that don't like no sunshine in the room.

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel

I hate to see the evenin' sun go down.

I have as much input to the blues; I just never got the chance, the opportunity or maybe the respect.

I like to play guitar, jam out, play the blues, go watch movies. I love movies.

I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

Little Walter I would've liked to have played with.

For a little kid like me, growing up in Carle Place, you put on John Lee Hooker late at night, and it's a different reality. I try to feel that music from the inside out because I was really attracted to it.

This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long. Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues… (Bunny Corcoran to Richard Papen)

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

I have as much input to the blues I just never got the chance, the opportunity or maybe the respect.

The blues demand of theology a prophetic criticism that contests all arbitrary uses of power or coercion, that challenges individual acquisitive materialism, that repudiates any and every attempt to undermine humanity's very humanness, and that cherishes the lives of ordinary everyday children and women and men of all cultures and races.

the darkness of God, the theologian accepts the gift of vocation—to bear the mythos, desires, sorrows, struggle, and hope of God's black peoples. Yet black Catholic theology, like the blues, is problematical, fluid, inventive, and the darkness illuminates new intersections, new switches, new tracks.

It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

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

My family was a Christian family. But I had to get to Kansas to play the blues.

My mum's family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.

I grew up in the South with my father; blues and country, that's always been my core. But I had it in me not to do what was expected. I wanted to find my own footing.

The workroom radio, tuned to FM 88.9, emitted Muddy Waters's throaty warbling. A rez station, WOJB did its best to hit every level of musical taste. Absolute bite-ya-in-the-ass blues was aired only during the wee hours. Tracker's favorite time and music.

I've got friends in low places, where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away.