Sonny Terry Quotes

My favorite moment of the whole thing was when John Belushi suggested that I get a hold of all the blues records I could so I could research the music.

I am a lover of all sorts of different music. I love blues and every piece of music that I have listened to has become an influence.

And my career, the things that have happened have happened because of my music education background.

My whole musical life has been an educational process, and I'm just furthering my education and filling in the blanks. There's stuff that I want to know that I don't know.

My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted to be able to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen.

You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters.

I listen to archival and historic recordings. I love watching singers. I learned a lot from watching videos.

I don't like music docs, usually. There's nothing to really say. What can you say about music? Normally, you can't say too much. There are a few really good ones, but the majorities are boring, I think.

I would just listen to records and learn what I could, then just roll it over and over and over.

When I graduated high school, I bought a guitar and, at first, didn't really think I'd get into the songwriting thing as much as I did. But after learning a few songs of other people's to play on the guitar, I got bored with that and just started writing songs on my own, and that's kinda how it came about.

I grew up listening to Jay-Z, and I think the first time I really became obsessed with learning and thinking about lyrics was when I started listening to rap; I was 11, 12, and started becoming aware of music beyond the familiar.

When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

There happened to be guitar classes at the college, and there was a guitar teacher there with whom I used to play. In addition, I also would go out into country schools and teach little kids basic guitar and singing a few times a week.

I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.

I would like to teach music. It's weird the way they teach music in schools like Julliard these days.

I took a private lesson, but it didn't really work out, so I went back to playing along with records. That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it.

I took music theory for one year in high school and flunked all but one six-week period. That's because I couldn't read music, and the rest of the class was already eight or nine years into it. The teacher would sit down and hit a ten-fingered chord on the piano and you had to write all the notes down in about ten seconds. I just couldn't do it.

I have a greater goal - to empower young people through music education.

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student.

I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I think music should be the basis of an education, not just something you do once a week.

I studied classical music for a year. Then, I studied jazz for a year at the New School, and then I got kicked out. You had to go to your class, so I don't know if that counts as studying. I didn't study jazz. I was supposed to.