Blues Quotes

“I've gotta stick to my roots, and my roots are blues.”

“In the late '70s, I had a band - the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name - and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.”

“Not that I got bored with it all, or I didn't like the people in The Moody Blues. I just wanted to go off and do other things purely because it was out there, you know. I'm kind of glad that I did and that I didn't just stick with one thing.”

“I've always seen music as colours, with basses maybe translating to dark blues, and trebles as yellows and ochres and a general sense of lights coming through.”

“I would sing the blues if I had the blues.”

“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.”

“If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.”

“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.”

“Man, don't get me started on Pat Travers. That dude writes killer blues rock and roll riffs.”

“When I started workin' with Muddy. That convinced me that I could get away with doin' the blues.”

“In September 2012, I got the blues pretty bad, so I stopped playing for a little while. I started to renew my playing by the time February of 2013 came around. I would go up and rehearse to different songs, play stuff like Count Basie records, jazz or rap.”

“I've never been an all-black girl. I like pinks and blues and greens. If you come over to my closet, you'll be able to find a rainbow of things to wear.”

“A guy will promise you the world and give you nothin', and that's the blues.”

“When I was a kid, we didn't have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.”

“I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.”

“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 I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do.”

“The social realism of ' Establishment Blues' or 'Like Janis,' are what I chose to use to express what was happening in the U.S. and what was happening to me personally.”

“Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.”

“The instrumental stuff is a good challenge, and it keeps my fingers athletically tuned, but I'm totally happy to bang away on some chords, sing some harmonies and play some wailing blues solos after the second chorus.”