Muddy Waters

“I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.”

“That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.”

“I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.”

“If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.”

“Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.”

“There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.”

“Now that I'm gettin' old enough to get some money, I'd like to have some money. I don't get much made, I need to conquer a big chunk of money. Not quit playin' but quit playin' so hard.”

“I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.”

“My grandmother, she say I shouldn't be playing. I should go to church. Fially, I say I'm going do this, I'm going do it. And she got where she didn't bother me about it.”

“I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.”

“I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.”

“I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.”

“I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.”

“Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.”

“Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.”

“I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?”

“You get a heck of a sound from the church. Can't you hear it in my voice?”

“Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.”

“I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.”

“I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.”