Tom Petty Quotes

I grew up listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and lots of blues, R&B and Motown.

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

Coming up in Chicago, we heard a lot of blues.

Definitely Muddy Waters has been a prime influence for anybody who's ever done anything rock 'n' roll.

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

Muddy Waters, I suppose, was my first great hero. You know, every boy wants to be a guitar player, and Muddy Waters was just the king. He was the King Bee. He was it.

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

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.

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.

I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.

My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.

Most white Americans only discovered the blues with the British invasion.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

Little Walter and Muddy Waters were incredible. And Bo Diddley was doing some great stuff, too.

Is there one blues guy who was the most sophisticated and influential, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in jazz? Was it Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, or all of them? I think you have to pick all of them.

Close to my heart is Muddy Waters. I love the way he sang. It was almost like a bark. It was like the bark of a dog: it's not fancy. Sometimes it's not like singing; it's like shouting.

After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues.

Hardly a day goes by without me sticking on a Muddy Waters record.

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".

I've always wanted the sound of Muddy Waters' early records - only louder

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.

People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.

I like the blues a lot. I grew up on it.

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