Quotes About African American Music

#1. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

David Simon

#2. I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

David Toop

#3. African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

David Simon

#4. Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

Johnny Otis

#5. I'd be happy if people said that I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.

Ahmet Ertegun

#6. Truth is self-evident, nonviolence is its maturest fruit. It is contained in truth, but is not self-evident.

Mahatma Gandhi

#7. I grew up in Synagogue in the boys' choir. We didn't listen to music in the house; only at temple. Then I went to a mostly African American high school on the South Side of Chicago and joined a gospel choir.

Mandy Patinkin

#8. I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

Maya Angelou

#9. It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.

Bill Taylor

#10. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

Moby

#11. Elena's lesson is not one of death and cancer; instead it is one of hope and life. She taught me how to live, how to love, and how to laugh. I will never forget that lesson.

Keith Desserich

#12. Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Cassandra Wilson

#13. To create extraordinary results, you must first have or ReThink an extraordinary Mindset to start.

Tony Dovale

#14. A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

Victor J. Banis

#15. My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people.

Paul Weller

#16. I would like to see more African-American singers as part of our opera companies. If you take music and the arts out of the public schools, then you're going to lose a lot of people that you might have discovered were talented, very early.

Jessye Norman

#17. Obama is learning very late that, for a superpower, inaction is a form of action. You can abdicate, but you really can't hide. History will find you. It has now found Obama.

Charles Krauthammer

#18. From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future.

Mary Landrieu

#19. Friendship is the greatest element in human life.

Euginia Herlihy

#20. Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

Bobby McFerrin

#21. Christ came to save us. If we have taken a wrong course, the Atonement of Jesus Christ can give us the assurance that sin is not a point of no return. A safe return is possible if we will follow God's plan for our salvation

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

#22. It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'

Joe Haldeman

#23. I know I'm an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I'm not a jazz musician. I'm not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It's in between these areas.

Anthony Braxton

#24. When it comes to African Americans and African American actors, Hollywood has always felt that if you can make us laugh, that's fine, but we don't need to see you do a 'Schindler's List,' where there's no jokes or music or comedic through-line.

Hill Harper

#25. American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

Rokia Traore

#26. What I consider to be the barometer for what is a rock artist and what is not, is somebody who has a certain element of blues, even a hint of soul or blues music, derivative of African-American blues, folk, spiritual, or gospel.

Ian Astbury

#27. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.

Marcus Samuelsson

#28. Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.

Wesley Morris

#29. He revolutionized music videos. Before Michael Jackson, MTV refused to play African-American artists.

Spike Lee

#30. New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.

Ned Sublette

#31. One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

Herbie Hancock

#32. I'm young, and maybe I'm naive, and he's dark, and maybe he's a bit dangerous.

J.M. Darhower

#33. The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.

Pete Seeger

#34. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.

Ketch Secor