Blues Legacy Quotes

I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.

When you think blues, you think BB King. Even a young kid can look at a picture of BB King and say, 'the blues.' The man is more than a musician. He's a monument.

In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

When I die, they'll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.

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

Blues is one of the most important art forms. It's an amazing music, and we don't want to lose it.

I just hope I'm remembered as a good blues musician.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

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.

If nothing else, we grew up loving the old blues artists and Ray Charles.

I think about legacy a lot, hopefully at the end of the day they say I was a good bluesman. That's all I want.

Actually, my mother turned me on to the blues. We had Lightnin' Hopkins as well as Elvis Presley records.

The first real thing I heard was Three O'Clock Blues by B.B. King. That's where it all began for me.

I said if you want to be Keith Richards, you've got to listen to Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Then I thought, "What did Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry listen to?" I said, "They listened to Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters." Well who'd they listen to? They listened to Robert Johnson. I said, "Ok, we'll start with that."

My most revered hero is Robert Johnson. His lyrics are so consistent with rap: the danger, the boldness, the creativity.

Of all the songs we played, 'Statesboro Blues' was the most ripped-off.

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

I'm certain that it was an incredible gift for me to not only be friends with some of the greatest blues people who've ever lived, but to learn how they played, how they sang, how they lived their lives, ran their marriages, and talked to their kids.

I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck.

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.

With Free, we had phased out all of the blues material and wanted to phase in all original material, and the only song that stayed from our blues past was 'The Hunter' by Albert King. People just loved that. And I said, 'We have to write a song that will top that - otherwise, what are we doing here?' That was the birth of 'All Right Now.'

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

The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren't using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn't know what it was. But I found Lightnin' Hopkins.

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.