A Quote by B. B. King

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore. — © B. B. King
Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.
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 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.
You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing - it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?
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.
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.
Theres no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, Im 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.
We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.
You play a 'lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be' blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere. Ain't goin' nowhere.
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.
See, I have a different type of music from other peoples. They playing the other kind of blues, and I'm playing cotton-patch blues.... Ain't nobody now can play the blues that I play.
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.
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.
I don't play anything but the blues, but now I could never make no money on nothin' but the blues. That's why I wasn't interested in nothin' else.
I listen to, like, funky Chicago blues. I love blues, but I love the funky, happy blues. There's a song about pretty much everything, including kidney stones, believe it or not. So there's something there for whatever you happen to be suffering, you know?
After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues.
You don't have to play a whole lot of guitar to be a good blues player. Some people plays too much guitar. Stack it on top of each other the way it don't - you're working too fast. Blues not supposed to be played fast. Blues supposed to be played slow. You could kill a man with just one chord.
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