We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.
There's always talk about the blues dying out, but it won't.
No matter what you got, the blues is there
Blues is like American Express. I don't leave home without it.
The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits
We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.
The blues is played everywhere. There's no place I've been where they don't have blues or aren't interested in blues.
I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched 'The Blues Brothers' movie over and over.
Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
Blues is not a dream, blues is truth.
I've always had a great love for the blues.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .
My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.
The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.
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.
I've listened to blues my whole life. I know it, I play it, I understand it.
For a little kid like me, growing up in Carle Place, you put on John Lee Hooker late at night, and it's a different reality. I try to feel that music from the inside out because I was really attracted to it.
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.
When I was sixteen I was pretending to be Charlie Musselwhite. I had a long raincoat on, my hair slicked back, and the shades.
The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
You can go to Europe, and there's no turnin' back - any parts of Europe. Wherever you are, there is no stop and go for the blues. The blues go but it don't stop.
The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.
People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.
I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.
