A Quote by Ray Charles

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

Ray Charles

Quote Topics

Approach Blues Country Country Music Different Different Thing Different Things Forth Good Jazz Like Makes Man Music Special Them Things Utility

Quote Author

Ray Charles
American - Musician
September 23, 1930 - June 10, 2004

I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.

Sarah Vaughan

Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good.

B. B. King

I've purposely made my music to be challenging and different. There's some electronics, R&B, blues, Motown, country, jazz and lots of soul.

Jack Garratt

Skiffle was blues featuring a washboard and acoustic instruments. It encompassed blues, with elements of folk, jazz, and, at times, American country-and-western music.

Van Morrison

For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source

Duke Robillard

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

Rokia Traore

That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.

Alvin Lee

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

David Johansen

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

Alexis Korner

I was in school for jazz voice, which is the dumbest way to spend $35,000 a year. I just felt like a rip-off of good jazz singers. I didn't feel like I was being anything special, and I always wanted to be special. It's like you know you have something inside you that's gonna make you different than everybody else and make you somebody in this life, but you wish you could figure out what it is, because at most things, you're either mediocre or really, really bad.

Nellie McKay

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

Etta James

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

Wynton Marsalis

If you were to talk to somebody from Georgia you would understand what he's saying, he wouldn't sound like your next-door neighbor in Montana, but other than that it's the same language, just with a few little different nuances. That's just like country and blues, or blues and rock 'n' roll. They're the same music with different accents.

Daryl Davis

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

Jerry Garcia

I like soul, I like rock, I like new wave, I like punk music, I like blues, I like jazz, and I was brought up on all of them from a young boy all the way to my teenage years, when I was wild and crazy, in college.