Quotes About Blues

I was always a closet blues player.

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

Some people have these small, positive schemes for survival, a kind of strength that I am attracted to, maybe because I'm prone to the blues.

The song of the blues, the song of the music, was something a lot of people missed out on. They thought they had to swagger a certain way or bark at the mic, and you don't have to do that.

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.

Rock & roll music is a derivative of rockabilly music; rockabilly music is Bill Monroe and the blues tied together. That's it.

Facinating. He broke into a wide grin. I've discovered something, Khufu. This is not Memphis, Egypt. Khufu gave me a sideways look, and I could swear his expression meant, Duh. I've also discovered a new form of magic called blues music, the man continued. And barbecue. Yes, you must try barbecue.

We'll check out this bar and find you a vampire. And if he's not tormented, I'm sure I can fix that. Paranormal Romance Blues

The Bluesis the roots of all American music.

Americans are accustomed to seeing the subversive impact of popular music. Blues, jazz, rock, punk, rap, and so on—popular music has been like the prow of an icebreaker, bursting through the frozen sea of convention.

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

To blues purists, the Chambers Brothers, Lightnin' Hopkins—even, at a stretch, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry—were authentic exponents of an ethnic folk culture, while Bloomfield, Butterfield, and Bishop, talented as they might be, were interpreters. That Butterfield had two black musicians in his band proved he was genuinely linked to the tradition, not that he was genuinely part of it.

the shift from banjo to guitar played a significant role in the rise of blues: Banjos have very fast sound decay, which means that one has to play relatively quickly and cannot mimic the drawn-out contours of a vocal performance. The guitar has greater sustain, making it more appropriate for slow songs, and also has a warmer tone, making it more suitable for accompanying sentimental ballads or moaning hollers.

Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, "The blues ain't nothing but a low-down, aching chill.

Ida Cox, sang that the blues was nothing but "your lover on your mind" and "a slow aching heart disease.

The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.

However hallowed by history, though, the idea that blues is fundamentally a musical heart-cry has some problems. For one thing, along with some of the most moving, cathartic music on earth, the American blues tradition has produced thousands of comical party songs and upbeat dance music.

the first published blues was a song called "I Got the Blues," which appeared in New Orleans in 1908. Its composer was an Italian American named Antonio Maggio, and it began with a twelve-bar section using a melody that is a clear predecessor of W. C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues.

There is also a purely musical definition of blues: a progression of chords consisting of four bars of the tonic (I), two bars of the subdominant (IV), two bars of the tonic (I), a bar of the dominant seventh (V7), a bar of the subdominant (IV), and two final bars of the tonic (I).

It was records, though, that made blues a dominant force in the African American entertainment business and the model for later pop trends from R&B to hip-hop.

Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as "Crazy Blues.

Mainstream pop favored romantic dreams, but blues dealt with the sorrows and joys of real relationships: cheating, abandonment, and abuse were balanced by exuberant physical pleasure.

A specifically rural-sounding blues style did not reach a mass audience until 1926, with the first recordings of a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson.