Top 100 Quotes About The Blues
#1. Simple music is the hardest music to play and blues is simple music.
Albert Collins
#2. AC/DC is a prime example of taking that blues rock thing and just living in that world. They only really move the furniture around a little on each album, but it still works.
Joe Perry
#3. If you can't play the blues ... you might as well hang it up.
Dexter Gordon
#4. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
Michael Tippett
#6. The idea of a hypnotic riff as the prime mover of a piece of music has been around for a long time, whether you're talking about the Delta blues or music from Middle Eastern and African cultures.
Jimmy Page
#7. 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
#8. Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
Wynton Marsalis
#9. I had listened to Joe Turner. When they'd book Joe there, I'd play the blues behind him.
Jay McShann
#10. I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.
Sammy Hagar
#11. Around this world will I be enough?
From the liquor stores, to the train stop floors, your filthy room, your drama blues
I am nothing if I'm not with you.
Sara Quin
#12. Rap to me is a modern blues. But until we really confront the truth, we are going to have a Tupac or Eminem or Biggie Smalls to remind us about it - and thank God.
Stevie Wonder
#13. If you don't think you have the blues, just keep living.
Buddy Guy
#14. It was so much fun to do, play the blues and then play a Monkees' set on the same night.
Peter Tork
#15. My father's nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that's how I decided I wanted to get into music.
Charlie Wilson
#16. Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.
Steve Cropper
#17. 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
#18. If you hand me a guitar, I'll play the blues. That's the place I automatically go.
Eric Clapton
#19. I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.
Billie Holiday
#20. Some of my favorite films are musicals, like 'Walk the Line,' 'The Rose' and 'Lady Sings the Blues.' I just love the way the music and the story fuel each other.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#21. The sad thing about reading the book and then watching the movie is that they have to die all over again.
Joyce Rachelle
#22. 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
#23. Ah the three-day blues, all new mothers cry on the third day. And I remember thinking, But my goodness, who wouldn't cry?
Liane Moriarty
#24. 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
#25. This Classic Rock 'n Blues Tour / Hippiefest roster promises a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see some of the best, legendary artists of our lifetime. I can't wait to be a part of it.
Rick Derringer
#26. There are happy blues, sad blues, lonesome blues, red-hot blues, mad blues, and loving blues. Blues is a testimony to the fullness of life.
Corey Harris
#27. Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'
Buddy Guy
#28. I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place.
William Bell
#29. 'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.
Jerry Leiber
#30. To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.
Etta James
#31. New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.
("New York Blues")
Cornell Woolrich
#32. I sang in church growing up. Memphis is the blues capital of the world, we like to say.
Justin Timberlake
#33. I have as much input to the blues; I just never got the chance, the opportunity or maybe the respect.
Luther Allison
#34. I pawned the remote to my misery,
trading it in for liquor that was cheap;
screwdrivers for my vitamin c,
and a little bloodstream to my IV,
helping to soothe my lunacy
Phil Volatile
#35. While the House of Blues slogan has been 'In blues we trust,' its stages are usually filled with more reliable moneymakers - Neil Diamond and A Tribe Called Quest among them.
Bill Dedman
#36. Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Toni Morrison
#37. Robert Johnson invented the blues, at midnight, at a crossroads, after selling his soul to the devil. Dorothy Parker invented amusing women, at 2 p.m., in New York's best cocktail bar, after tipping a busboy 50 cents for a martini. It's hard not to draw conclusions as to which is the brighter sex.
Caitlin Moran
#38. Aren't all the best songs about a girl? It doesn't matter if it's metal, if it's country, if it's blues or rock and roll; all the songs that make us remember and make us want to sing along are about the best kind of girl, the kind you can't live without but can't ever get ahold of.
Jay Crownover
#39. 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
#40. New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
Tim Cahill
#41. Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.
Jimmy Rushing
#42. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.
Rachel Miner
#43. To a lesser extent (they like) the whites and reds, but blues, yellows and oranges are the main bee flowers. Although there are very good white bee flowers - white sweet clover is the best honey plant in the world.
Chip Taylor
#44. I love songs, and I love songwriting, and there's a standard of songwriting within Chicago blues in particular. I don't like the sad blues, necessarily; the Chicago blues is what I like, which is the kind of blues you can dance to.
Sinead O'Connor
#45. There's only two kinds of music: the blues and zippety doo-dah.
Townes Van Zandt
#46. I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.
D.H. Lawrence
#47. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played.
Kurt Vonnegut
#48. Do I love the road? Honestly? No - but it's how I earn my living. I also don't have the blues, like it's some kind of fever. The blues is my job. It's what I do.
B.B. King
#49. The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.
Alexis Korner
#50. The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.
Muddy Waters
#51. 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
#52. If you're going to get into music, you've got to learn the 12-bar blues.
Johnny Ramistella
#53. Quincy and Jake seem to be content to spend an enormous amount of time along together, which I count as romantic, but might simply be because they don't have a child: the Blues versus the world.
Sally Koslow
#54. It's six o'clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark - three-quarters down not three-quarters up - and the night begins.
("New York Blues")
Cornell Woolrich
#55. I don't want to be in some big beautiful place that nobody want me, because I play the blues.
Luther Allison
#56. When I began my career, I was constantly referred to as the kid who could play the blues.
Jonny Lang
#57. The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.
DJ Shadow
#58. Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.
David Bowie
#59. Yazoo is the name of an old blues label and also a town in America. I like it because it doesn't mean a thing, it has no immediate connotations. That's what I hate about so many names today - they're so obviously fashionable.
Alison Moyet
#60. 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
#61. The blues are just a heightened sense of awareness of life's ups and downs, and things that a guy sees after a couple hits of Jack Daniels.
Steven Tyler
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm and Blues.
Mick Taylor
#65. The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.
Billie Holiday
#66. When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.
Hugh Laurie
#67. The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
Alan Lomax
#68. Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.
Bob Dylan
#69. Catch a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain. Wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone ... The blues are all the same.
Jackson C. Frank
#70. 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
#71. I never thought I was playing black music. I was just playing music, the stuff I liked. I sang blues at parties and things when I was a kid.
Mose Allison
#72. Of all the excellent copyedits I've received over the years, Marie-Lynn Hammond's was by far the best. Her work on Half Blood Blues was incredibly sensitive and astute.
Esi Edugyan
#73. The blues is deceptively simple. Verse and chorus. Sometimes not even a chorus. Four bars that repeat, no Auto-Tune, electricity optional. It is the most direct, bare-bones of content. There is no interference between the head and heart.
Shawn Amos
#74. We had a missionary zeal about blues music, and I felt, particularly, that Mickie Most was attempting to homogenize, sweeten, and make it accessible for the mass market. Which is understandable if you're the producer, but aggravating if you're the artist.
Alan Price
#75. I had a problem with cops pulling me over all the time for speeding. When I was doing Hill Street Blues, the cops said how much they loved the show as they were writing me up; meanwhile my insurance went through the roof.
Jennifer Tilly
#76. You better change your ways / And get really wild. / I want to tell you something / I wouldn't tell you no lie. / Wild women are the only kind / That really get by, / 'Cause Wild Women don't worry / Wild Women don't get the blues.
Ida Cox
#77. But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real
But you're bound to lose
If you let the blues get you scared to feel
Joni Mitchell
#78. I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.
Derek Bailey
#79. There were times I thought I was going to turn to the blues, but then I'd hear better blues players.
Stephen Stills
#80. I think the blues will always be around. People need it.
Johnny Winter
#81. 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
#82. Everybody started calling my music rock and roll, but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playing down in New Orleans.
Fats Domino
#83. You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
Van Morrison
#84. I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
Loudon Wainwright III
#85. My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
Alvin Lee
#86. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
Bob Dylan
#87. I thought of the many times I saw that little boy in the azure eyes. The many times I wanted to protect him...save him. Ryker's eyes could turn from sky blue to storm clouds in seconds!
Sarah Brocious
#88. I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#89. I've always loved the blues, ever since I was a kid. It has a depth to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn't have. It has pain and suffering in it, but funny stories, too. And it is built on storytelling, which is something I really love.
Nickolas Ashford
#90. 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
#91. Tina Turner gave me the highway blues.
Elton John
#92. There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.
Lucinda Williams
#94. I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself ... In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.
Charles Burnett
#95. The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
Tim Cahill
#96. I wanted to know everything about the blues. I think it constantly changes for me.
Jason Momoa
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. We hit every jazz and blues club on and off Bourbon Street, dancing and drinking until we girls were drunk enough to go with the boys to the strip clubs which outnumbered all other businesses in the French Quarter. Here is where my solution unfolded.
Darwun St. James
#100. When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life.
Etta James
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