Quotes About Singing The Blues

#1. Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.

Albert Collins

#2. God, I'm just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?

Joe Cocker

#3. The harmonica is the most voice-like instrument, you can make it wail, feel happy, or cry. It's like singing the blues without words.

Charlie Musselwhite

#4. Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help.

Mahalia Jackson

#5. My uncle was 16, in junior high, and he heard me singing and snatched me off the stage. I thought he was happy and was going to pat me on the head and say I was good. But he took me home and told my grandmother this youngin' was at school singing the blues.

Mavis Staples

#6. 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

#7. Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

Etta James

#8. I got put out of my church choir because my pastor said, 'We can't have baby sister singing the blues and coming in here and singing on Sunday morning.'

Merry Clayton

#9. When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life.

Etta James

#10. The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

Barbara Hambly

#11. If winter were a person, I would kill them. I would go to jail for sunshine, birds singing and the smell of fresh cut grass hmm fresh cut grass.

Sonya Watson

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. When we sing the blues, we're singin' out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

Zora Neale Hurston

#18. There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.

Ethel Waters

#19. Ten minutes before you go onstage and you begin singing that torchy blues song, you may just be drinking a glass of water and brushing your teeth and doing some deep breathing.

Ronee Blakley

#20. The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing.

Bessie Smith

#21. My style of singing is very much Latin jazz meets Latin and a little bit of rhythm and blues. When I do ballads, my fans love it. They want to listen to my classics. They want to party.

La India

#22. I would think, to me, growing up in the south, growing up with all the gospel music, singing in the church and having that rhythm and blues - the blues background was my big inspiration.

Jackie DeShannon

#23. The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

Lucinda Williams

#24. Down Hearted Blues, by Bessie Smith. This is the song Ingersoll is singing to the baby

Tom Franklin

#25. 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

#26. I started singing on the radio in Los Angeles. I sang blues, but I would tend toward country blues.

Georgia Holt

#27. Dean Martin's pancreas, who overheard his liver singing I got a right to sing the blues. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#28. By the way, Reb, about the singing. What gives? Walt Whitman sang the body electric. Billie Holiday sang the blues. You sang ... everything. You could sing the phone book. I would call and say how are you feeling, and you'd answer, The old gray rabbi, ain't what he used to be ...

Mitch Albom

#29. See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.

Jimi Hendrix

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

Bob Dylan

#33. My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.

Alison Moyet

#34. 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