Logic Quotes

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues.

Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.

Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.

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.

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 is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

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.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

If you're doing black music, you should have a core understanding of where that comes from, and the fundamentals - so you're not some bozo thinking you're doing something new.

I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It's the foundation of rock and roll.

Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.

I mean, rock 'n' roll is based on the blues, whether people want to know that or not.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.

In terms of black music - the only music that we can call our own, that was really born here - I don't think a lot has been done to chronicle the relations between American history and where black music fits in.

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits

A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of.

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.

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

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously!

The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.

For a musician to be good, he has to have humanity and care about the other guy. And as for blues - in a sense, black people have kept this country alive and given us our entire musical heritage.

What we admit to is being a rock n' roll band. From day one, I was a big Chuck Berry fan.