Tyler Perry Quotes

As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

I prefer black music in general.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

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

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith sinking Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.

Jazz is the American’s preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires ...

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I'm older - I'm in my early 50s - so you'll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.

American music culture is black culture.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

Memphis is the place where rock was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. It's full of contradictions, abject poverty, and riches that only music can provide.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

Soul music is timeless.

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

I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.

You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.

Darlin... be-bop is the music of the future.

A whole generation of young whites have involved themselves with traditional Negro music.

I wanted to bring the R&B flavor and other Westernized sounds to my music, because that's the type of music I grew up listening to.