Top 98 Blues People Quotes
#1. We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
Wynton Marsalis
#2. I'm certain that it was an incredible gift for me to not only be friends with some of the greatest blues people who've ever lived, but to learn how they played, how they sang, how they lived their lives, ran their marriages, and talked to their kids.
Bonnie Raitt
#3. If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.
John Lee Hooker
#4. There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
Ethel Waters
#5. With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, white and black.
Jack White
#6. I know some people will be surprised to hear it, but I've found that my music, whether its blues or rock, or whatever you want to call it, can be channeled into a positive direction that actually helps people.
Rick Derringer
#7. When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, 'That's just that ole blues singer.'
B.B. King
#8. People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
Brian Setzer
#9. Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
Langston Hughes
#10. When I was a kid, we didn't have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.
Tom Petty
#11. People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow ... The blues is about truth-telling.
Alberta Hunter
#12. 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.
Wynton Marsalis
#13. All of my favorite songs can bring me to tears. Some are rock, some are blues, some are love ballads. That's why I play music - to touch other people as I have been touched.
Kelly Blatz
#14. One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.
Greil Marcus
#15. Poor people have the blues because they're poor and hungry. Rich people can't sleep at night because they're trying to hold on to their money and everything they have.
John Lee Hooker
#16. Good things are associated with blue, like clear days, more than singing the blues. Just the word 'blue' in the singular is full of optimism and positive connotation to most people.
David Carson
#17. We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.
Mick Ralphs
#18. I'm trying to get people to see that we are our brother's keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.
B.B. King
#19. The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.
Albert Murray
#20. Well, people who are blues purist types are usually the most vocal and the ones that pop up on the websites.
Jonny Lang
#21. 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
#22. Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of.
Lauren Worsham
#23. The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.
Robbie Robertson
#24. 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
#25. I think it will always be around it just takes one person to make people aware of the blues.
Johnny Winter
#26. The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.
Sherley Anne Williams
#27. I don't like no fancy chords. Just the boogie. The drive. The feeling. A lot of people play fancy but they don't have no style. It's a deep feeling-you just can't stop listening to that sad blues sound. My sound.
John Lee Hooker
#28. I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.
Bonnie Raitt
#29. Mostly, whenever I'm booked to do instruction, I just play a little bit and get people to ask questions. We'll play some music for 'em, 'til somebody hollers out, 'Play 'Milk Cow Blues' or 'Play 'San Antonio Rose.' We play requests and demonstrate our music.
Johnny Gimble
#30. A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.
Joan Jett
#31. If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.
Imelda May
#32. People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses.
Markus Zusak
#33. It is commercial pop that the majority of people understand. A working man's daughter would not understand blues.
Barry Gibb
#34. Comedy is the blues for people who can't sing.
Chris Rock
#35. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
Alan Lomax
#36. Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.
Gillian Flynn
#37. A lot of people relate me to the blues but I don't think it's a hindrance at this point. I've been doing it long enough that I can do different things and be accepted.
Paul Butterfield
#38. I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.
Edgar Winter
#39. 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
#40. When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
#41. Most people say, 'Well, Earl, you sing the blues,' or however they want to categorize it. I just sing songs.
Earl King
#42. There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.
Johnny Winter
#43. Blues purists never cared for me. I don't worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made 'Three O' Clock Blues,' they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I'm trying to satisfy.
B.B. King
#44. The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.
Jimmy Rushing
#45. Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.
Steven Bochco
#46. Before I left, I opened a lot of doors for a lot of people to play the blues.
Luther Allison
#47. It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.
James A. Baldwin
#48. If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money.
B.B. King
#49. The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It's a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.
David Edwards
#50. The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.
Steve Vai
#51. People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches - like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin - were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.
Ahmet Ertegun
#52. That's where my influences lie, in the blues with people like Muddy Waters and Tina Turner. At first I didn't really like the idea of working with synthesizers but now I think they're fun, there are no restrictions. Not that I understand how they work.
Vince Clarke
#54. Listen to positive music, watch positive videos or movies, hang out with positive, upbeat people. The last thing a blue mood need is more blues. Don't be volunteer victim; be a fighter.
Les Brown
#55. A lot of people wonder, what is the blues? Well, I'm gonna tell you what the blues is ...
Howlin' Wolf
#56. My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right
Muddy Waters
#57. Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.
Brownie McGhee
#58. Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.
Wynton Marsalis
#59. I love Ruth Brown, not just her singing, but Ruth Brown has more girl power than anyone, because she fought hard against people who ripped her off and then helped other artists through the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.
Ronnie Spector
#60. So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody.
Archie Shepp
#61. I never build myself us. I let the people do that. I'm the most laid-back person, and I let them build me up. If you ask me, I say, 'I'm just a guy playin' some blues.
John Lee Hooker
#62. I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#63. The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain't no vampire!
B.B. King
#65. 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
#66. I think the blues will always be around. People need it.
Johnny Winter
#67. I got a head full of headaches, a heart that's full of woes.
I'm constantly singin' them down home blues, and not many people knows
That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it ...
And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.
Aceyalone
#68. Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things.
Big Bill Broonzy
#69. My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
Walter Becker
#70. I'm very lucky that people are able to say, 'Oh, that's that Moody Blues guy!' I'm very fortunate with that. That's all. Without the songs, I think, I'd just be a pretty average karaoke singer. In the end, it comes down to the songs: the strength of the songs.
Justin Hayward
#71. The difference between blues, jazz, rock n' roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It's scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
Russell Simmons
#72. You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing - it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story ... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing ... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?
David Edwards
#73. Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.
Steve Cropper
#74. What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories
that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.
Richelle Mead
#75. Well first of all, I'm a singer. I sing since I talk. So the great ballad singers, the people that sang with so much feeling, jazz, blues, all those singers, they were songs that I listened to, records that my mom played for me, and then later I bought.
Gloria Estefan
#76. Listen here people, listen to me
Don't try to buy no home down in Washington D.C.
'Cause it's a bourgeois town
wooh it's a bourgeois town!
I got the bourgeois blues
I'm gonna spread the news all around
Huddie Ledbetter
#77. People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.
B.B. King
#78. I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I've never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I've wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn't work.
B.B. King
#79. I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother's aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.
B.B. King
#80. The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.
B.B. King
#81. 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.
John Lee Hooker
#82. 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.
Jesse Stone
#83. So the blues player, he ain't worried and bothered, but he's got something for the worried people.
Roosevelt Sykes
#84. The blues is not a plaything like some people think they are.
Son House
#85. The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.
Johnny Winter
#86. I came from a family where my people didn't like rhythm and blues. Bing Crosby - "Pennies from Heaven" - Ella Fitzgerald, was all I heard.
Little Richard
#87. There was a time when black and navy blue suits were pretty much everything you saw. That has completely changed. People are wearing big checks, checks with browns and blues and shades of gray, and the scale is very large, and some of them are very bold with heavy contrasts.
Patrick Grant
#88. There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.
Muddy Waters
#89. I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future.
Willie Dixon
#90. People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues.
Willie Dixon
#91. A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.
Etta James
#92. Some people tell me that the worried blues ain't bad. Worst old feelin' I most ever had.
Robert Johnson
#93. I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means- the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.
Charles Bukowski
#94. People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.
Janis Joplin
#95. The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity
Joe Perry
#96. In the late '70s, I had a band - the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name - and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.
David Johansen
#97. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
Ernest Gaines
#98. I'm sure there are a few things in my CD collection that might surprise people. I like classical music, the blues, and I'm a big fan of alternative rock.
Brad Paisley
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