Blues Quotes

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.

The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

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.

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

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.

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.

Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.

I think I'm more influenced, just in general, not by blues artists, but more by stuff from Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder is probably my biggest musical influence of all. And Donny Hathaway.

I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I sang in church growing up. Memphis is the blues capital of the world, we like to say.

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.

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.

James Cotton is a real blues guy, and he played with Muddy Waters, and it surprised me that they would want me to make a record with them, that he called me to do this record. I'd never done anything like that before. But I love blues, so I was very happy.

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.

I like to listen the blues and some classical.

I just like the blues better than rock 'n' roll.

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

I tend to play a lot of blues things at home, because most blues things are basically within a 12-bar pattern.

I think every once in a while country has lost its way, but found its way back. It's always going to drift away from the traditional side, but then find a way to return. There's room for all kinds of influences be it pop, blues, gospel or whatever. But I will always say that I think we need more traditional country music coming down the pike.

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.

Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is a total take-over of our lives.

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

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.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm and Blues.