Ritchie Blackmore Quotes

I was into Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, the blues.

My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.

We were into Hendrix and Cream, who were like the heaviest bands around at that time. We just wanted to be heavier than everybody else!

I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul... Then Chet Atkins-type stuff.

It was Jimi Hendrix that I first got into when Betty Mabry turned me on to him.

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck made me an Anglophile. I listened to English and Irish artists as a kid, and they were way louder, heavier, and faster than the traditional blues that I was listening to.

I'm pretty sure I was about the only kid in school who knew who Jimi Hendrix even was. Through my older siblings, I was getting turned on to all the great music that was happening at the time, and I really loved Hendrix.

Jimi Hendrix played loud and free, Sergeant Pepper was real to me.

I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.

I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.

I would love to play Jimi Hendrix.

I liked the Beatles because there was so much melody. Jimi Hendrix is still one of my heroes.

Jimi... He was the gov'nor and that's it. He was brilliant, wasn't he?

I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.

I used to play quite a good lead guitar, R&B style. Clapton and BB King are heroes.

I thought Jimi Hendrix... was just phenomenal.

Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.

I'm not like other guitar players. In fact, I'm not even like most acoustic players because I use the nylon-string acoustic. I do play steel-string and the electric guitar, too, because I love rock 'n' roll and guitarists like Jimi Hendrix. But my bread and butter has always been the nylon-string.

I grew up in Georgia, so I grew up listening to the Allman Brothers.

I liked the Doors and that kind of music.

I was inspired to play electric guitar from listening to a lot of Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and B.B. King, and that's always been the kind of music that I gravitate toward.

Ginger Baker was never my favorite, but he was part of the group Cream that opened the door to what we did. They were the first band to really get into improvisation. They were an absolute necessity to what came later.

I listen to 'Purple Haze' a lot. If I'm in the gym, I listen to that album the whole way through sometimes.

Hendrix was a different kind of guitar player. It was like, 'Holy cow, this guy can sing, he can play all this weird stuff... what is this?' It was a new kind of music.

When I was starting my journey as a young guitar player, I was listening to The Beatles, the Stones, and all the British invasion bands, Top 40, Motown, and all the great music of the '60s. Then the alien ship landed, and life changed again forever... Jimi Hendrix.