Blues Guitar Quotes

#1. Say what you will about Gypsy women, but they are remarkable assessors of blues guitar talent.

Gary Gulman

#2. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

B.B. King

#3. I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock.

John Mayer

#4. Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.

Bonnie Raitt

#5. I forget what the official name of it was, but they did an all-day of roots music - every kind of music you can imagine from around the country - New Orleans Jazz to Indian flute players, R&B, you name it. I met and became good friends with (blues guitar player) Joe Louis Walker. He was on the show.

Scotty Moore

#6. I'm not good enough to be playin' much acoustic guitar onstage. Man, you gotta get so right; I mean, the tones, the feel, the sound. Plus, acoustic blues guitar is just that much harder on the fingers.

Johnny Winter

#7. You don't have to play a whole lot of guitar to be a good blues player. Some people plays too much guitar. Stack it on top of each other the way it don't - you're working too fast. Blues not supposed to be played fast. Blues supposed to be played slow. You could kill a man with just one chord.

David Edwards

#8. I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

Boz Scaggs

#9. When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do.

David Byrne

#10. My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.

Todd Rundgren

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

Dane Cook

#12. I think that the blues is in everything, so it's not possible to neglect it. You hear somebody go 'Ooh ooh oooh,' and that's the blues. You hear a rock n' roll song. That's the blues. Somebody playing a guitar solo? They're playing the blues.

Wynton Marsalis

#13. I bad a piano long before I bad a guitar, and the practice I got just playing those three chords in a basic 12-bar blues song was very important.

Mark Knopfler

#14. I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.

Dan Auerbach

#15. I will always love the guitar as long as I'm alive, the Blues is my heart.

Eddie Kirkland

#16. The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric's vocals. There's never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.

Alan Price

#17. The early influences, in many ways, were in Baltimore. I was passing open windows where there might be a radio playing something funky. In the summertime, sometimes there'd be a man sitting on a step, playing an acoustic guitar, playing some kind of folk blues. The seed had been planted.

Jerry Leiber

#18. If you don't know the blues ... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

Keith Richards

#19. If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I'd never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

B.B. King

#20. When you think of blues, all you think about is crying guitar like B.B. King's guitar. You think about someone crying that their woman's gone. And how bad life is and all that. Why can't it be something happy with the blues? Why can't it have a hip-hop beat to which you can do the dances of today?

Ike Turner

#21. Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.

George Thorogood

#22. I'd play whenever I could get my hands on an electric guitar; I was trying to pick up rock'n'roll riffs and electric blues-the latest Muddy Waters. I'd spend hours and hours on the same track, back again, and back again.

Keith Richards

#23. My dad was good friends with the Bad Medicine Blues Band - one of the only blues bands in Fargo, as you can imagine! He took me out to see them play when I was 12 years old and I was really inspired by their guitar player, Ted Larsen.

Jonny Lang

#24. I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.

Johnny Winter

#25. 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.

David Gilmour

#26. Sometimes I feel like nothin,' somethin' throwed away,
Somethin' throwed away.
And then I get my guitar, play the blues all day.

William Christopher Handy

#27. The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.

Lykke Li

#28. I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.

Lou Doillon

#29. There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer.

Rick Derringer

#30. When I heard "Pride and Joy" by Stevie Ray Vaughn on the radio, I just said "Hallelujah" .. he was just so good and strong and he would not be denied ... he single handedly brought guitar and blues oriented music back to the marketplace

Richard Betts

#31. My guitar is my torch, my soul carries the flame. Make no mistake, I'm a true blues man.

Big Bill Morganfield

#32. When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.

Pete Townshend

#33. Blues music is becoming more and more popular than it ever was. I'm always meeting people on the road that are really young, and are guitar players. male and female.

Mick Taylor

#34. As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.

Boz Scaggs

#35. I was glad to see other blues guitarists like Albert King have crossover successes like me. We played in the same places like the Whisky and the Filmore. When Albert made his guitar cry, he could cut you so deep!

B.B. King

#36. If you hand me a guitar, I'll play the blues. That's the place I automatically go.

Eric Clapton

#37. I'm singing the way that I love to sing, which is like old soul, like old Al Green. I grew up about an hour from Memphis. So all that music that I grew up with - the Stax music and early rhythm 'n' blues - I'm doing that. I'm actually getting out from behind my guitar and I'm singing.

Sheryl Crow