A Quote by August Wilson
My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.
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I still think the best metal bands have a blues feel. The first Black Sabbath album is kind of a bludgeoning of blues. Deep Purple also started out as a blues band.
There are happy blues, sad blues, lonesome blues, red-hot blues, mad blues, and loving blues. Blues is a testimony to the fullness of life.
I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working.
I have heartaches, I have blues. No matter what you got, the blues is there. 'Cause that's all I know - the blues. And I can sing the blues so deep until you can have this room full of money and I can give you the blues.
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.
Nowadays blues in particular has a wide, wide, wide, wide net of everything that's called blues. I think if somebody's coming to it in the last ten years or whatever, or even fifteen years, what their experience is what is called blues is different from mine. I have to expand my range of what's been called the blues. I think somebody who's new to it would have to go back and to see what is called blues now, where it came from. If that makes sense.
Lonnie Donegan and the folk movement were responsible for a lot of the spread of the blues in England. The group Them with Van Morrison was a big influence on me, too, as were The Stones; The Yardbirds, John Mayall, and the other British blues pioneers.
You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.
A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.
I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.
The blues is played everywhere. There's no place I've been where they don't have blues or aren't interested in blues.
The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.
A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.
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.
Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.
The amazing thing about Sweets [Edison] was that he exactly spoke the way that he played! He was really unique, the one and only. He was one of the greatest Blues players that I ever heard and played with. Nobody can play like Sweets man, nobody! Most of us, musicians, frequently quote Sweets' phrases in our solos. Like Lester Young, Sweets had a big influence on us musicians, especially when we play some Blues.
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