Top 1200 Delta Blues Quotes & Sayings - Page 15
Explore popular Delta Blues quotes.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.
We played, jazz, blues, dixie, and it all came from the church. When I went to church, I would see the sisters and brothers doing the same beat.
Of all the excellent copyedits I've received over the years, Marie-Lynn Hammond's was by far the best. Her work on Half Blood Blues was incredibly sensitive and astute.
That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.
Cinderella obviously got caught up in the hair metal scene, but they were such a blues band. And such a good live band.
Rap to me is a modern blues. But until we really confront the truth, we are going to have a Tupac or Eminem or Biggie Smalls to remind us about it - and thank God.
Country, blues, rock 'n' roll, these are things that anybody can sing - male, female, person of color. From wherever you are in the world, you can sing this.
There's a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-'60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.
In my late teens, early 20s, when I started stand-up and I was living downtown for the first time, I was deep into my blues and Bukowski phase. And, you know, that's when that's appropriate. And I grew out of it.
Some of my favorite films are musicals, like 'Walk the Line,' 'The Rose' and 'Lady Sings the Blues.' I just love the way the music and the story fuel each other.
From country rock to Cajun, classic rock to Latin, and blues to Americana, I've had the pleasure of re-discovering the 'jewels' from my repertoire that are so well-liked.
There's always music that moves me. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's within the parenthesis of rock or blues, or whatever. It's usually far more reaching than that. It can be in many different genres.
To me, country music is like the blues, but it's something very hip and - I don't want to say commercial - but it's very worldly and good listening.
I got put out of my church choir because my pastor said, 'We can't have baby sister singing the blues and coming in here and singing on Sunday morning.'
What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
I've always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.
My favorite moment of the whole thing was when John Belushi suggested that I get a hold of all the blues records I could so I could research the music.
I got one of the best sax players in the business - Arno Hecht. He plays with the Uptown Horns and all the great blues bands. He expresses the heart of the Apollo Theatre, let me tell you.
I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you're young, it's hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.
Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good - he's rock's #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us
Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.
My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach.
One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.
Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.
The strange thing is I can't play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.
I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.
I really wanted to be a blues/jazz/gospel singer, but times had changed and disco was now the music - the new sound. I embraced it with all my heart and the rest is history.
When I picked up my guitar, I spent the first day learning the chord E, the second day A, then B7, and all of a sudden, I could play the blues.
Blues teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.
'Hairdresser Blues' was written when I was deep in a ten-year depression that I escaped shortly after recording that album. I don't like that album.
Y'know, you can sit in a room, practise all day, learn your scales and blaze blues riffs: it's easy to hide behind that. But I think with the slide, it's a little bit tougher.
Dean Martin's pancreas, who overheard his liver singing I got a right to sing the blues. Never got a dinner!
In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.
The first record I heard as a kid? My dad is a great soul and blues fan, so he showed me James Brown. That was my first stuff, and I loved it.
I listen to all kinds of music myself; it can range from practically anything: Opera, Jazz, to Blues, good Pop, just about anything.
The harmonica is the most voice-like instrument, you can make it wail, feel happy, or cry. It's like singing the blues without words.
Listen to really old blues guys and how they weren't allowed to sing about what they meant; they alluded to things. I find that style amusing, and I think it's a little harder to write.
I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Got those moods a swinging, tears a slinging, nothing fits me, when it hits me, ranting, raving, misbehaving, PMS blues.
We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.
When I was a kid watching "The Blues Brothers," I could not think of a better thing than watching 300 cop cars crash into each other.
All my stuff is pretty seamless - like now, while I'm touring [Yesterday I Sang The Blues], today I'm going to go in the studio, I'm writing my next one. For me it's continual.
Depending on how I'm feeling that day or the music I'm listening to, I will pick appropriate lighting to help create the atmosphere for me. I use a lot of blues and purples.
I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.
Hey, White, you know where your loyalties are? Right here. The old pinstripes. No! You never wore them... So you have a right to sing the blues.
I had always intended to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. I don't suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so.
I've always wanted to visit [Washington]. The Smithsonian has some fantastic archival material on blues music, which I'm really into. There's a ton of stuff I want to do there. but it just never happened.
My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.
The one thing the blues don't get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people's throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.
Most blues guitar players don't concentrate on singing and melodies. And forget about the bridge - the bridge doesn't exist. They go straight for the solo.
I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.
I cut all my early records in Nashville, so I guess that makes me country. I call it country pop, but my love of the blues is in there, too.
I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.
The consolidation of the music business has made it difficult to encourage styles like the blues, all of which deserve to be celebrated as part of our most treasured national resources.
Now and again there will be the occasional joke about owing someone two dollars from the days in '63 when I was a broke blues singer with a washboard, but it's good. I'm happy.
It was a time after 'Lady Sings the Blues' and 'Mahogany' and all those romantic movies: I became this romantic figure on the street in a very special way.
I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.
My wife one time got a fishbone stuck in her throat and had to fly back to L.A. from Monte Carlo to have it taken out. I thought, 'Wow, what a great blues song!'
