David Edwards Quotes

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.

When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it.

The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.

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.

I've gotta stick to my roots, and my roots are blues.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

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.

I was born out of classical music.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

I don't just come from a musical family, but from a musical community.

I'm not trying to emulate or imitate. But I do believe that I embody that spirit from Robert Johnson on up.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

I come from a place where there's a lot of musical families.

To have a body of work is a blessing - when you have songs that have been around generation after generation that they call timeless music, you can work that for a long time.

Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.

I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

I believe Dad will be respected in 300 years, like Beethoven. As will Elvis, as will the Carter Family, as will Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams.

I think blues music is music of the soul. Of course, there are other forms. You could call some classical music blues music in that way.

When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life.

The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.

Growing up in a family that listened to almost nothing but classical music had its effects, as well. "California Über Alles," the first Dead Kennedys single, was inspired musically more by Japanese Kabuki than anything else.

Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.

Big train from Memphis, now it's gone gone gone, gone gone gone. Like no one before, he let out a roar, and I just had to tag along.