Alberta Hunter Quotes

For a while I had a blues band in L.A., but I realized I was too optimistic to play the blues. I did not have the misery in my heart that the blues required.

I listen to blues music a lot and that's a good person feeling bad and celebrating that pain by releasing it in that kind of joyous fashion.

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.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

The blues are just a heightened sense of awareness of life's ups and downs, and things that a guy sees after a couple hits of Jack Daniels.

When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life.

If you hand me a guitar, I'll play the blues. That's the place I automatically go.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

A good cry can be wonderful sometimes, and sadness is nothing more than love announced. Sadness and Unhappiness are not the same thing, and it is good to remember that. And there is this: sadness cleanses the heart.

You've got to sing from the depths of the heart. Without heart, you cannot be a Qawwal.

The one thing I loved about blues and soul was the way they taught the world how to express such deep feelings.

Blues is life, you know? An appreciation for the depth of life and the fact that hard times strengthen you and make you ready - blues, a lot of times, is about the loss of love.

The form of the blues helps us express our joys, our fears, our - anything you want to express. And it helps you get it out instead of it spiraling inward, and you're getting twisted up and exploding. So it's a bit of salvation.

American blues can make you sad.

Blues is a very physical music.

My first mixtape especially - that came from a heartbreak.

My idols are singers like Billie Holiday and Erykah Badu because there's no gloss on what they do.

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Though my heart is filled with feelings I want to convey You see, I can't express them in words If I had not met you I wouldn't even have such an embarrassing pain

The human heart has a sigh lonelier than the cry of the bittern.

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

You know, when I'm playing, I think of myself in front of the Wailing Wall with a saxophone in my hands, and I'm davening, I'm really telling it to the Wall.

People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow...The blues is about truth-telling.