Jesse Stone Quotes

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

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

Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other.

There weren't any white people in this country who didn't know who Gladys Knight was. Or the Pips were, as far as that's concerned.

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

Music in the U.K. is not racialised in the same way as it is in the U.S. In the U.S.. it's more rigid and conservative. And white people in the U.K. have more close proximity with black people and people of colour in general.

The whole thing about 'progressive R&B' blows my mind. Black music has always been progressive.

When I was a kid, I was following black soul music.

I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought up the name 'rock n' roll.'

I grew in the inner city, listening to Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, James Brown, The Commodores - lots of soul 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.

Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.

I'd really like to do a biopic of a musician.

Historically, black music has influenced other cultures and other genres and created other genres.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

I prefer black music in general.

The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.

You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.

If there was no black man there would be no Rock'n'Roll. The beat, the rhythms of Africa are what created Rock'n'Roll and Jazz.

I think America concedes that true American music has sprung from the Negro.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

I think we did our first session in 1958. There were no black background singers - there were only white singers. They weren't even called background singers; they were just called singers. I don't know who gave us the name 'background singers,' but I think that came about when The Blossoms started doing background.