Brian Setzer Quotes

Throughout the '50s, tons of unknown locals came through Sun to record their demos. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all made their first recordings at the former Memphis Recording Service.

Sun Studios was where so much of American music exploded from.

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

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

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 was an original Elvis fan. He was the voice of my generation. I was listening to him on the radio when he released his great Sun records with Scotty Moore on electric guitar and Bill Black on bass.

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

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.

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

I heard Robert Johnson way before I heard about Eric Clapton.

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

ZZ Top did get a chance to play with Lightnin' Hopkins and Jimmy Reed, there's still that one, single song we just can't shake... J.B. Hutto's "Combination Boogie".

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

All the really great records or people who made them somehow came from Memphis or Louisiana or somewhere along the Mississippi River...And singers like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters gave me the feeling that they were right there, standing by the river.

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.

I loved Carl Perkins, Jerry lee Lewis... not only were they personal friends.

Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people.

Elvis deserves a lot of credit for bringing the blues to middle America, not the Vegas stuff. The early stuff, The Sun records, and the first few RCA records. He was wonderful, he had the power, the drive, and he was so dedicated to his music.

For me, Memphis has always been a city that holds a great deal of meaning and also leads me to a lot of thinking. Besides Sun Studio, which helped put rock n' roll on the map all over the world, the legendary Stax Studio also called Memphis home.

The first band I identified with from Chicago was the Muddy Waters band.

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.