Top 100 Quotes About The Blues
#2. If you don't think you've got the blues, just keep living, and if you don't think you're drunk, just keep drinking what you're drinking.
Buddy Guy
#3. I think it will always be around it just takes one person to make people aware of the blues.
Johnny Winter
#4. I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
B.B. King
#5. I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a
coffee cup in a park for old men playing
chess or silly games of some sort.
Charles Bukowski
#6. Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
Billy Gibbons
#7. 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
#8. Another thing to do with the blues is how they were recorded. They were done on the quick, and some of that stuff was made on wire, not even tape, let alone digital.
Keith Richards
#9. The world has made everything else and still it can't make peace. And the reason it can't make peace is because of the evil, ignorance and stupidity. I have songs that explain these facts. And that's the blues.
Willie Dixon
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. I've got the blues in my heart, and the devil in my fingers.
Angus Young
#13. I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that's okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can't ever rest on your laurels.
Carlos Santana
#14. 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.
#15. My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.
Mark Knopfler
#16. I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.
George Carlin
#17. white or black. rich or poor. if you ever had your heart broken you have right to sing the blues
Big Mama Thornton
#18. The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.
B.B. King
#19. 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
#20. The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.
Albert Murray
#21. 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
#22. I'm trying to get people to see that we are our brother's keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.
B.B. King
#23. There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#24. I come from a democratic world. My world is moderate Democrats, Reagan-type Democrats if you want, the blues or whatever you call them, the Blue Dogs. That's been my world, historically.
Carl Paladino
#25. 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
#26. I get the blues for him, for me, for all of us: for want of something to do we keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.
Charles Bukowski
#27. So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues.
Steven Tyler
#28. I'm a big, big blues fan and the last several years I've really invested in the blues a lot, and I think my playing is getting better because of it - not necessarily better on a technical level, but certainly on a level of appropriateness.
Vivian Campbell
#29. I played in Velvet Revolver, which is a raw, bombastic blues band with a punk rock edge to it. It's like everything is based around the blues, no matter what the groove is.
Scott Weiland
#30. Beer's for the good times. But ain't nothing like a big ass bowl of ice cream with all the trimmings to chase the blues away for me.
Elizabeth Reyes
#31. 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
#33. You don't know what love is, until you've learned the meaning of the blues, until you've loved a love you've had to lose.
Chet Baker
#34. 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
#35. I like to listen the blues and some classical.
Peter Tork
#37. Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.
Jerry Leiber
#38. One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.
Carla Bley
#39. You can go to Europe, and there's no turnin' back - any parts of Europe. Wherever you are, there is no stop and go for the blues. The blues go but it don't stop.
John Lee Hooker
#40. I like to play guitar, jam out, play the blues, go watch movies. I love movies.
Dane Cook
#41. The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Russell Baker
#42. What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.
Nick Hornby
#43. I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.
Ritchie Blackmore
#44. All the blues greats took chances and developed their own style. They didn't copy.
Robert Cray
#45. The blues ain't nothin' but a botheration on your mind.
Memphis Slim
#46. 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
#47. Carvin Jones is one of the brightest young stars on the blues scene today
Albert Collins
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.
Jess Row
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together.
Tom Waits
#57. I still like to play the blues more than anything else.
Christine McVie
#58. 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
#60. The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.
Willie Dixon
#61. Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.
Henry Rollins
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. Singers come and go; the music business waxes and wanes. The blues are popular and unpopular, often at the same time.
Linda Barnes
#68. 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
#69. The music pot is broad. It's just unfortunate that the record companies cry the blues as frequently as they do.
Vance Gilbert
#70. The Blues
The Blahs
The Weary Dismals
Lost in Gloom
Woesome Me's
The Eternal 3 AM of the Soul.
Vivian Swift
#71. There are only two kinds of songs; there's the blues, and there's zip-a-dee-doo-dah,
Townes Van Zandt
#72. In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.
Alexis Korner
#73. The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.
Willie Dixon
#74. 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
#75. An element I love about the blues is jamming with other musicians.
Gary Hoey
#76. My mama used to say the blues is an ailment that don't like no sunshine in the room.
Lisa Wingate
#77. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
Ralph Ellison
#78. 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
#79. My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach.
Frederick Lenz
#80. Like you and your woman ain't gettin' along and you're in love. You can't sleep at nights. Your mind is on her - on whatever. You know, that's the blues. You can't hug that money at night. You can't kiss it.
John Lee Hooker
#81. My first car was a 1976 Toyota Corolla Liftback in red, like the one in 'The Blues Brothers.' I painted a Union Jack on the roof. I was absolutely in love with it until I destroyed it, which broke my heart!
Richard Hammond
#82. 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
#83. Elvis, he was unique. And he loved the blues, it was a pity he didn't do more.
B.B. King
#84. 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
#85. I saw 'Mahogany' and 'Lady Sings the Blues' when I was little and thought, 'That's what I want to do.'
Tamara Taylor
#86. You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.
Herbie Mann
#88. Love caught me with my pants down, watering skeleton flowers and humming the blues.
R.X. Bird
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. I probably owe as much to Jeff Beck as I do to Son House with connections to the blues.
Billy Gibbons
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I am not the blues, I am jazz. I want to be present in the moment, not wallow in it.
Christopher Moore
#95. The last thing that the blues needs is another smart-ass white boy with an attitude.
Brownie McGhee
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. There's a difference between the blues of the New Orleans guys and anyone else and the difference is in a chord, but I can't figure the name of it. It's a different chord, and they all make it.
Jimmy Rushing
#99. The blues will be blue, and the jealousies green, but when love picks its color it demands to be seen.
Garth Brooks
#100. The blues is celebration, because when you take sorrow and turn it into music, you transform it.
Odetta
