Top 100 Quotes About Blues
#1. I've always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that.
Harry Seidler
#2. The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists ...
Jimmy Page
#3. The old Fleetwood Mac was much better; they did some beautiful and, to my mind, very authentic blues. Chicken Shack did pretty well in Europe, but after I left, it was over.
Christine McVie
#4. Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
Allen Ginsberg
#5. She performed a few Bacharach songs next: "Close to You," "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," "Walk On By," plus Laura Nyro's "Wedding Bell Blues.
Haruki Murakami
#6. Carvin Jones is one of the brightest young stars on the blues scene today
Albert Collins
#7. Hey. Please. This is not the Midwest. All right? Michigan is the Midwest, God knows why. This is the Plains: a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the Blues.
Tracy Letts
#8. I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Adrian Mitchell
#9. I must confess that waltzes do not move me, I guess I hummed the blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.
Assata Shakur
#10. Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.
Jess Row
#11. It wasn't an attack. We'd been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.
("New York Blues")
Cornell Woolrich
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.
Noah Gray-Cabey
#16. When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it.
Gin Wigmore
#17. For a while I had a blues band in L.A., but I realized I was too optimistic to play the blues. I did not have the misery in my heart that the blues required.
John C. Reilly
#18. The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.
Tom Waits
#20. Maybe it's because I'm a designer, but when I am in a state of excitement, everything is so sharp and colorful and amazing, and I can look at blue and I see the yellow in it and the green in it, and the green-blues, the yellow-blues, so.
Tom Ford
#21. I got to see all these incredible blues players, like Jimmy Reed.
Johnny Rivers
#22. I still like to play the blues more than anything else.
Christine McVie
#23. I base my roots and history in old blues, old country and old bluegrass, and I like rock 'n' roll, and somehow it all came together, and that is what I am playing now.
Tyler Hilton
#24. Blues ain't football. You don't have to retire at 30. You can grow and play all your life.
Elvin Bishop
#25. I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.
Jerry Hall
#26. There was some scene in The Blues Brothers movie, when they had the chicken wire across the front of the stage, and it was almost like that. They had a big guard rail around the stage, which kept the college kids from getting on ... we had some good times.
William Bell
#28. The sky was a pretty canvas of blushing oranges, electric pinks, deep blues and vibrant purples as the sun made way for the moon.
A.Z. Green
#29. The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.
Willie Dixon
#30. Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.
Henry Rollins
#31. I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.
Lou Rawls
#32. The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
Wynton Marsalis
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I've always felt that blues, rock 'n' roll and country are just about a beat apart.
Waylon Jennings
#36. Getting to play the blues has been transcendant for me. I can't say if my finest hour is yet to come, you want to make a dent in this world, well I do anyway.
Peter Tork
#37. And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself.
Julio Cortazar
#38. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
#39. I really enjoy spending Sunday evenings with friends, because Sunday evenings are always frightening. You are obsessed by the fact that you are working again the next day. And sometimes you get the blues. I always decide to spend it with friends. It's very nice.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
#41. Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.
Linda Barnes
#42. Someone once said that blues and gospel were fraternal twins, close in spirit, neither one wanting to admit how similar they looked.
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
#43. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing "All Blues," a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.
Blake Crouch
#44. Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.
Alberta Hunter
#45. I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.
Brittany Murphy
#46. The music pot is broad. It's just unfortunate that the record companies cry the blues as frequently as they do.
Vance Gilbert
#47. You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.
Dave Brubeck
#48. The Blues
The Blahs
The Weary Dismals
Lost in Gloom
Woesome Me's
The Eternal 3 AM of the Soul.
Vivian Swift
#49. If you get into introspective blues or something where you're stretching out a bit, large audiences don't respond to this, so you have to give them what they want, basically.
Van Morrison
#50. My influences in this world have always been Crazy Horse and Malcolm X, my overall influences. But I was influenced by rock n' roll, blues, and country music. I was influenced by singers.
John Trudell
#51. You play a 'lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be' blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere. Ain't goin' nowhere.
David Edwards
#52. No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.
Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher
#53. A lot of blues guitarists play with only three fingers, and they can't figure out certain runs that require the use of their little fingers. Classical training is good for that.
Ritchie Blackmore
#54. I am happy to be able to be part of this Rock'n'Blues Fest as the first tour since the amputation of my right leg. I hope this gives me a leg up on the new year!
Leslie West
#55. The sympathetic angel reached out and the moment she touched him, he gasped. This was no angel. There was no reprieve. ~ Michael O'Mara, from Angel's Blues
Rhonda Tibbs
#56. Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.
John Mayer
#57. They don't bother too much with the balance and things on blues records.
Maurice Gibb
#58. That's what Tina Turner did, too - sang blues up-tempo - and they called it rock 'n' roll.
Little Richard
#59. Well, I don't know how they define that. But they have this Texas blues thing blown kinda out of proportion. I am a Long John Hunter blues, before and after, that's what I am.
John Hunter
#60. I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.
Kevin Barry
#61. You're already dead inside. Years of living in Espoo have made you an empty husk of a human being. They don't call their hockey team the "Espoo Blues" for nothing.
Phil Schwarzmann
#62. I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and he would play the blues.
Koko Taylor
#63. Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.
Bonnie Raitt
#64. Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.
Christian Scott
#65. The last thing that the blues needs is another smart-ass white boy with an attitude.
Brownie McGhee
#66. I am not the blues, I am jazz. I want to be present in the moment, not wallow in it.
Christopher Moore
#67. Blues ain't never going anywhere. It can get slow, but it ain't going nowhere.
David Edwards
#68. I sing God's music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.
Mahalia Jackson
#69. I think that as you get older, you mellow out a lot more. Having been through the ups and downs in life, I feel more qualified to play the blues.
Mick Ralphs
#70. I probably owe as much to Jeff Beck as I do to Son House with connections to the blues.
Billy Gibbons
#71. 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
#72. Johnson was unknown to the vast majority of the blues audience and ignored by all but a handful of his musical peers until the "blues revival" hit in the 1960s.
Elijah Wald
#73. People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
Brian Setzer
#74. In those days, I didn't know how guys like Clapton and Beck were getting that searing blues lead sound, so I developed my style to be rhythmic and chord-based, with simple lead lines that you could almost hum.
John Fogerty
#75. The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.
Wynton Marsalis
#76. The crew on 'Varsity Blues' was phenomenal.
Ron Lester
#77. Love caught me with my pants down, watering skeleton flowers and humming the blues.
R.X. Bird
#79. I've been listening to quite a lot of classical music like Erik Satie, and quite a lot of blues.
Elizabeth Jagger
#80. You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.
Herbie Mann
#81. I saw 'Mahogany' and 'Lady Sings the Blues' when I was little and thought, 'That's what I want to do.'
Tamara Taylor
#82. Lightnin' Hopkins was something of a fixture on the Houston coffee house scene so we were witness to eccentric blues brilliance close up. Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form - the blues.
Billy Gibbons
#83. Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
Langston Hughes
#84. Elvis, he was unique. And he loved the blues, it was a pity he didn't do more.
B.B. King
#85. I realized I was tired of singing about trees and flowers. I wanted to sing about real life. From then on, nobody could tell me anything was better than blues.
Robert Cray
#86. Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, 'Oh man, this is the stuff.' It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling.
Carlos Santana
#87. When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.
Little Richard
#88. My favorite television show of all time is 'Hill Street Blues.' I think it's the show that is to television what Pele was to football or Muhammad Ali was to boxing.
Lennie James
#89. I was backstage at the House of Blues in L.A where I was about to perform, and Stevie Wonder and Prince turned up at my dressing room together! Stevie started beat boxing and Prince started singing one of my songs, all of a sudden it was like I was in a cypher with these incredible artists.
Jill Scott
#90. The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.
Willie Dixon
#91. My mama used to say the blues is an ailment that don't like no sunshine in the room.
Lisa Wingate
#92. I have a lot of friends who are involved in everything from Americana to blues to R&B to pop to country.
John Oates
#93. The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.
Jimi Hendrix
#94. An element I love about the blues is jamming with other musicians.
Gary Hoey
#95. To me, the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing; the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful, sorrowful thing. It's more reflective; it reminds you to feel.
Mick Fleetwood
#96. I moved from Chicago to New York in 1984 for 'Biloxi Blues.' In 1989, my wife and our then-baby daughter moved to Los Angeles to try to get in television.
Alan Ruck
#97. Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.
Stephen Stills
#98. I was singing when I was five years old. My sister and I both had the talent from mom and dad, and she was in opera and I was into pop and uh, rhythm and blues, anything, I was about a four octave singer.
Carl Gardner
#99. It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.
Steve Winwood
#100. Teenagers did not have, before rock 'n' roll and rhythm-and-blues - they did not have any type of music they could call their own once they got over 4 or 5 years old until they were well into their 20's and considered adults.
Sam Phillips
