Ray Manzarek Quotes

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

I started with Sam Cooke when I was 6 or 7 years old.

If nothing else, we grew up loving the old blues artists and Ray Charles.

Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.

I mean, rock 'n' roll is based on the blues, whether people want to know that or not.

Rhythm and blues used to be called race music. ... This music was going on for years, but nobody paid any attention to it.

The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from . . . the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That's what classical music is, real European music.

From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

We'd play the American bases and found all these wonderful records by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke. Without American music, there would not have been a British Invasion.

But I'm really into old music - bluesy, soulful singers, like Etta James, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. I wouldn't have minded being born in the 1960s!

Black people, we built America, and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres.

I don't sing white; I don't sing black - I sing Bronx. When I sing 'Ruby Baby,' I'm rolling like Jimmy Reed. I wanted to communicate like Hank Williams and groove like Jimmy Reed.

Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn't get much where I come from.

I think that if you hear music young, whatever music you hear influences you. I'm white, but I've been influenced by black music.

Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.

For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.