Mose Allison Quotes

Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

Muddy Waters, I suppose, was my first great hero. You know, every boy wants to be a guitar player, and Muddy Waters was just the king. He was the King Bee. He was it.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.

Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.

I grew up listening to spiritual music, Blind Willie Johnson and folk.

I play blues old-timey style.

I'm an old fan of the Negro spirituals.

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned.

I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

Robert Johnson? No, I didn't know him, personally.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith sinking Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.

The first music I remember hearing was the traditional songs of Kentucky - things like 'Roll Along Kentucky Moon.'

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.

A lot of my friends, they think I grew up to rock and roll, but I didn't. I grew up to Hank Williams, Jimmy Reid, Howlin' Wolf, listening to a race record, blues.

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.

One thing that I love about country music, probably more so than any other culture - maybe the blues rivals it - there are so many American folk heroes. There's the Coal Miner's Daughter, the Man in Black, the Red-Headed Stranger, and on and on.

Basically, I like anything with guts - Lead Belly, Bill Big Broonzy, Johnny Winter, the Stones.

As I was born and brought up in Himachal Pradesh, I used to listen to a lot of Hindi songs over radio apart from ghazals, western music, and 'Himachali' folk songs.

When I was a child, there was an old man who toured the villages with just a guitar. The first time I heard him singing Skip James songs, I thought he was singing in an African language.

After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues.