I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
I grew up singing Ray Charles and Jimmy Reed.
I listen to music mostly in the evening. I've come to love what is called world music, like the Zimbabwean Oliver Mtukudzi and the Colombian singer Marta Gomez. I also love the Irish folk singer Mary Black. Other favorites include Chet Baker, Eva Cassidy, and Billie Holiday.
I still think the best metal bands have a blues feel. The first Black Sabbath album is kind of a bludgeoning of blues. Deep Purple also started out as a blues band.
I was inspired to play electric guitar from listening to a lot of Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and B.B. King, and that's always been the kind of music that I gravitate toward.
I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.
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.
Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck made me an Anglophile. I listened to English and Irish artists as a kid, and they were way louder, heavier, and faster than the traditional blues that I was listening to.
Big train from Memphis, now it's gone gone gone, gone gone gone. Like no one before, he let out a roar, and I just had to tag along.
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.
Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured
I'm not committed to putting myself up for a blues guitarist, even though I love playing the blues.
When I grew up, I had influences as diverse as Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix.
I saw B.B. King in concert one time where he had this guy that would bring him out a glass of water and towel to wipe his forehead with.
I got my start in small dive bars in New Orleans.
Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.
My heroes were gospel blues players like Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, not whoever was number one.
I grew up listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and lots of blues, R&B and Motown.
What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
I didn't even respect singers until I heard Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.
I think of people like Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes. They all came out of the South, and they followed a certain tradition and energy. That's no knock to groups like The Temptations or The Supremes, not at all, but they were way more polished in how they did things.
When I play, maybe 'Back o' Town Blues,' I'm thinking about one of the old, low-down moments - when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. That's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, 'I got another mule in my stall.'
I've always loved the blues, John Lee Hooker, Janis Joplin, Hendrix.
The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.
