Top 1200 Delta Blues Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.

Blues artists now try and stay in a box. Back in the day at all the clubs you would see James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, The Isley Brothers, Little Richard and Etta James all play the same venues. It was a mix of funk, soul, blues and rock 'n' roll.

I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It's music that feels like home to me.

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

When I started off in Wales, I sang and accompanied myself with guitar in the '50s. And then I got a band together, which is a rhythm section, really. I used to do a lot of blues, and rhythm and blues, and '50s rock 'n' roll and country, and all kinds of stuff.

I never had the blues; the blues always had me.

I kind of got really, really into 'Hill Street Blues' when it came out. I used to leave a class early just to make sure I could watch the episode of 'Hill Street Blues' that day.

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.

Gary Burnetts office is shelved with theological books, guitars fill the floor, and the drawers are crammed with CDs. In The Gospel According to the Blues, Gary brings his vocation as a New Testament teacher together with his passion for the blues and gives the reader scholarly knowledge and wise insight.

With Free, we had phased out all of the blues material and wanted to phase in all original material, and the only song that stayed from our blues past was 'The Hunter' by Albert King. People just loved that. And I said, 'We have to write a song that will top that - otherwise, what are we doing here?' That was the birth of 'All Right Now.'

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.

I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

Every other start-up wants to be another United or Delta or American. We just want to get rich.

My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.

I don't visit my parents often because Delta Airlines won't wait in the yard while I run in.

We come from a generation where the music was very innovative, a lot of it coming out of blues and influenced by blues: the idea was that you would jam on things, and you'd try things out. You took a journey, and you took a left turn, and you experimented live right there in the moment.

The early years when I was starting, blues player, you wasn't always welcome in a lot of the other places. People usually have preconceived ideas about blues music. They always feel that it's depressing and that it's just something that a guy sit out on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever.

If I go into the Mississippi Delta at pitch black midnight and put on a Robert Johnson record, it's hard to sit in the car because it's pretty powerful.

You don't have to play the blues to play rock 'n' roll, but that's where, somewhere along the line, your influences came from. I mean, I don't care where you got it from. If you got it from Eric Clapton, he got it from the blues.

I'm a big, big blues fan and the last several years I've really invested in the blues a lot, and I think my playing is getting better because of it - not necessarily better on a technical level, but certainly on a level of appropriateness.

I know that for category purposes, people have to lump certain artists in with genre that they make their name or their bones in. Nobody can tell me that Taj Mahal is pure blues. Nobody can tell me that Mike Bloomfield was pure blues. It was a lot of other things going on as well.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

We're not going to play the blues anymore. Let the white folks play the blues. They got 'em, so they can keep 'em.

I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

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.

In the same way I wanted to learn how to play poker, I've always kind of been into the blues. It just seems like a cool thing, but I didn't know much about it. So I thought, 'Hey, let's really learn about the blues.'

I grew up listening to Patsy Cline. I was a huge Patsy Cline fan. I still am. Even though she's considered country, I think of her more as a blues singer. She's got a great blues voice, and she has such an amazing story, which I always loved.

I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.

It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.

I am more of a rock guy than I am a blues guy. People get the idea that I am a dyed in the wool blues cat, but I rock out when I do my show you know that.

When you think blues, you think BB King. Even a young kid can look at a picture of BB King and say, 'the blues.' The man is more than a musician. He's a monument.

The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other: all night long. It's not too cold in that bed, and it ain't too hot. But what's the matter? The blues has got you.

Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm.

The Niger Delta is an occupied territory. Citizens raise their hands in the creeks each time they see the military

Lightnin' Hopkins was something of a fixture on the Houston coffee house scene so we were witness to eccentric blues brilliance close up. Then, believe it or not, along came the wave of the English cats like John Mayall, Eric Clapton and the Stones embracing the great American art form - the blues.

When we sing the blues, we're singin' out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

My father was always playing this ethnic blues stuff around the house, and both my parents played. Then one day my father brought home Big Bill Broonzy, and there he was sitting in our living room playing, and blues was in my heart from the time I was 12 years old.

The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. Its cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. Its not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.

That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.

The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. It's cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. It's not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.

We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.

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.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.

Whenever I was in the dressing room on my own, I'd start playing blues to myself. One night, Bob Daisley, the bass player, came in and said, 'You know, Gary, you should make a blues album next. It might be the biggest thing you ever did.' I laughed. He laughed, too. But I did, and he was right, and it was.

The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people. ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.

I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Mitt Romney is to presidential campaigns as the Delta House grade point average was to Faber College - the worst in history.

Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'

I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.

What excited me when I first came into it was the performing aspect and doing blues-oriented material, rock/blues oriented stuff, basic stuff, basic what they call rock 'n' roll.

I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck.

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.

But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism.

When the blues came out, it was something pure and undefined, but when all these white groups got hold of it, it became something else that didn't sound anything like the original. So you had Led Zeppelin doing their thing, which had come all the way from the blues.

According to Biblical history and all of the history of the world, the blues was built in man from the beginning. The first thing that came out of man is the blues because, according to the Scriptures, when God made man, man was lonesome and blue.