Top 100 Quotes About The Blues Music
#1. When I learned to play music, I was listening to blues music. And all the blues music I liked was super simple and stripped down. And then all the hip hop I liked was super simple and stripped down and we always heard that connection.
Dan Auerbach
#2. Simple music is the hardest music to play and blues is simple music.
Albert Collins
#3. The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
Michael Tippett
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. '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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. There's only two kinds of music: the blues and zippety doo-dah.
Townes Van Zandt
#16. If you're going to get into music, you've got to learn the 12-bar blues.
Johnny Ramistella
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
Bob Dylan
#25. I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#26. 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
#28. When I got a little bit older I wanted to play piano - that's all I wanted to do. I remember learning how to play a blues progression on the xylophone in music class and thinking "This is the greatest thing I've ever learned."
Zooey Deschanel
#29. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#30. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
Edgar Meyer
#31. There's always music that moves me. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's within the parenthesis of rock or blues, or whatever. It's usually far more reaching than that. It can be in many different genres.
Jimmy Page
#32. The blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad.
Leon Redbone
#33. The Blues are a simple music and I'm a simple man. But the Blues aren't a science, the Blues can't be broken down like mathematics. The Blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look!
Johnny Ferreira
#34. So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.
B.J. The Chicago Kid
#35. When I heard "Pride and Joy" by Stevie Ray Vaughn on the radio, I just said "Hallelujah" .. he was just so good and strong and he would not be denied ... he single handedly brought guitar and blues oriented music back to the marketplace
Richard Betts
#36. Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.
Jorma Kaukonen
#38. When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.
Frank Iero
#39. I grew up with the Blind Boys' music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
Ben Harper
#40. When I think of music, I think of music in its totality, complete. From the lowest blues to the highest symphony, you know, so what I'd like to do is exemplify each style of as many periods as I can possibly do.
Donny Hathaway
#41. The workroom radio, tuned to FM 88.9, emitted Muddy Waters's throaty warbling. A rez station, WOJB did its best to hit every level of musical taste. Absolute bite-ya-in-the-ass blues was aired only during the wee hours.
Tracker's favorite time and music.
Mardi Oakley Medawar
#42. 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
#43. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
Brian Eno
#44. I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.
John McLaughlin
#45. I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
Lou Doillon
#46. With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
Brian Setzer
#47. From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.
Kathleen Battle
#48. The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.
Lykke Li
#49. The consolidation of the music business has made it difficult to encourage styles like the blues, all of which deserve to be celebrated as part of our most treasured national resources.
Bonnie Raitt
#50. It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
Tim Cahill
#51. If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work
Jeff Chain
#52. I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.
Zoe Kravitz
#53. You might say that the universe plays the blues.
David Byrne
#54. When the slaves left Africa, they left us this music. They left us blues.
Youssou N'Dour
#55. My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.
Miles Davis
#56. The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.
Jack White
#57. It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.
Jim Sullivan
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Kurt Vonnegut
#63. I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
Hamid Drake
#64. That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.
Alvin Lee
#65. The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.
Willie Dixon
#66. When all the original blues guys are gone, you start to realize that someone has to tend to the tradition. I recognize that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive, and it's a pretty honorable position to be in.
Eric Clapton
#67. You know, the BBC had not been particularly generous in its deliverance of blues and esoteric kinds of music.
Keith Richards
#68. I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.
Quincy Jones
#69. I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.
Abigail Washburn
#70. In general, those from outside the southern culture built a style around exaggerations of southern music, and missed the lonesome hillbilly and blues feel that was its core. In the quest for abandon, they also failed to understand that southern music is lazy music - at any tempo.
Colin Escott
#71. We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.
Jon Stewart
#72. Stop thinking about the steps. There are no moves in blues, only movement. Just listen to the music," Matt whispered into my ear.
I let go, softening into his arms. The sways became steps, and without even realising, I was dancing.
Renee Conoulty
#73. The world I live in is benefiting from things like satellite radio. Jazz and blues fests are everywhere now, and Americana is going strong on college radio. What I'm hearing is an appreciation of real music.
Bonnie Raitt
#74. You can't overthink the music. Mood and intensity can't be manufactured. The blues isn't about structure; it's what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.
Jimmy Page
#75. The musicians that didn't know music could play the best blues. I know that I don't want no musicians who know all about music playin' for me.
Alberta Hunter
#76. My favorite moment of the whole thing was when John Belushi suggested that I get a hold of all the blues records I could so I could research the music.
Steve Cropper
#77. The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.
Bill Medley
#78. You hear lots of notes, don't you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there's not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between.
David Mutti Clark
#79. It is secular spiritual music, the gospel blues. It's music from the heart instead of the head.
Charlie Musselwhite
#80. I have to have music playing constantly. It creates the tone and mood for anything you are doing. I specifically love rock, and Jimi Hendrix is one of my favorite artists. My favorite song is 'Red House,' because it's heavy on the blues.
Marisa Miller
#81. When you look at so much of what we all love, there's either soul-based to it, or it's the blues. It's really the beginnings of any kind of music. It really is; it all starts there. Because after that, it's music of the moment.
Paul Weller
#82. 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
#83. The sound of the blues, rhythm and blues, country music, is what we lived for, black and white alike. It gave you strength to sit on one of those throbbing Allis-Chalmers tractors all day if you knew you were gonna hear something on the radio or maybe see a show that evening.
Levon Helm
#84. I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.
Bill Nighy
#85. It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.
Eric Clapton
#86. I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
Bryan Ferry
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
Wynton Marsalis
#90. 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
#91. One of my reasons for living in California is its close proximity to Mexico. The Latin influence is in every corner of the community. My love of Spanish music hasn't wavered since the '50s. I could hear the blues voicing from the Flamanco families and I always dig for inspiration in Latin music.
Eric Burdon
#92. Elvis deserves a lot of credit for bringing the blues to middle America, not the Vegas stuff. The early stuff, The Sun records, and the first few RCA records. He was wonderful, he had the power, the drive, and he was so dedicated to his music.
Peter Tork
#93. 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
#94. The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. It's cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. It's not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.
Gary Clark Jr.
#95. My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#96. The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.
B.B. King
#97. The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.
Ronnie Wood
#98. Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it's Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It's just the beat that changes.
L.A. Reid
#99. 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
#100. There would be no rock and roll or rhythm and blues without Leo Fenders' contribution ... the tone is everything
Bonnie Raitt
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