Cornel West Quotes

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.

The blues have always had some of the best times, best feelings I’ve ever had.

Blues is like American Express. I don't leave home without it.

It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits

I believe in blues, and I believe that it's been misrepresented.

I don't think there is much American music.

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

One thing the blues ain't, is funny.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

I think the blues will always be around. People need it.

Blues players are around for 50 years, and that's just fine.

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

American blues can make you sad.

The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.

I've always had a great love for the blues.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.

When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

No matter what you got, the blues is there

I grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.

I wanted to know everything about the blues. I think it constantly changes for me.