Blues Musician Quotes

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

I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.

The early years when I was starting, blues player, you wasn't always welcome in a lot of the other places. People usually have preconceived ideas about blues music. They always feel that it's depressing and that it's just something that a guy sit out on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever.

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.

Little Walter I would've liked to have played with.

Sonny Boy Williamson (II) was a beautiful guy, a straight guy... (but) he was always raising hell one way or another, so you never could tell if he was drunk or sober.

When I was sixteen I was pretending to be Charlie Musselwhite. I had a long raincoat on, my hair slicked back, and the shades.

I loved Jimmy Reed, the chord changes, the lyrics.

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned.

My father's nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that's how I decided I wanted to get into music.

Skip James, for me, is the meaning of the blues.

I was in love with Paul Butterfield.

Oh yeah, I know Johnnie Bassett. We were part of that whole thing.

I'm a blues guy at heart, so silly music isn't generally what I do. I'm a I'll-cry-as-my-guitar-gently-weeps kind of guy.

Everybody thinks I'm, like, a bad boy. I've had my day, but I just sit at home and play the blues mostly.

Michael Bloomfield came in after rock n roll started, and he was a great guitarist. He idolized me - I know that. What else can I say ? he was a young, excitable man. To him, drugs were plentiful, and that was no good. I talked to him like he was a son of mine. He was a great and he was gonna be greater. But he was part of the "in-crowd" and so he never got there

When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.

My mom would have liked it that I patterned myself more after Jimmy Reed.

John Mayall doesn't get enough credit. He's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is a tragedy.