Ronnie Wood Quotes

The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

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.

When I was a kid, we didn't have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.

I grew up listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and lots of blues, R&B and Motown.

Well, I grew up on the blues, man!

You play a 'lowdown dirty shame slow and lonesome, my mama dead, my papa across the sea I ain't dead but I'm just supposed to be' blues. You can take that same blues, make it uptempo, a shuffle blues, that's what rock n' roll did with it. So blues ain't going nowhere. Ain't goin' nowhere.

I played with Sam Lay, Jimmy Reed, Big Walter Horton, Big Moose Walker, and all those guys.

There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing.

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.

It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.

Little Walter and Muddy Waters were incredible. And Bo Diddley was doing some great stuff, too.

The blues is played everywhere. There's no place I've been where they don't have blues or aren't interested in blues.

Actually, my mother turned me on to the blues. We had Lightnin' Hopkins as well as Elvis Presley records.

That's what Tina Turner did, too - sang blues up-tempo - and they called it rock 'n' roll.

The blues will always be because the blues are the roots of all American music.

Definitely Muddy Waters has been a prime influence for anybody who's ever done anything rock 'n' roll.

My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

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.

As for the way we play, we are as much like the Beatles as any American Jazz group is like any other.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

Coming up in Chicago, we heard a lot of blues.

Blues is a big part of rock and roll. The best rock and roll got its birth in the blues. You hear it in Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

Ain't nobody more punk rock than Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, even Little Richard.