Blues Roots Quotes

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 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.

Jimi Hendrix came from the blues, like me. We understood each other right away because of that. He was a great blues guitarist.

Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly in him, also, even Little Richard. He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington.

The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.

My family was a Christian family. But I had to get to Kansas to play the blues.

I probably owe as much to Jeff Beck as I do to Son House with connections to the blues.

To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.

My father was always playing this ethnic blues stuff around the house, and both my parents played. Then one day my father brought home Big Bill Broonzy, and there he was sitting in our living room playing, and blues was in my heart from the time I was 12 years old.

Eric Clapton was such a great player. He sounds like he's Freddie King or someone like that. He plays the roots of blues and Delta blues. He really affected me with the way that he plays, because he never really plays that many notes.

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

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

Rock & roll seemed to just come to us, on the radio and in the record stores. It became our music. . . But then we uncovered another, deeper level, the history behind rock and R&B, the music behind our music. All roads led to the source, which was the blues.

The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.

I never listen to Led Zeppelin. But, I mean, I don't think Robert Plant or Jimmy Page listen to Led Zeppelin, either. We all probably obsessed over the same old blues records growing up.

We played, jazz, blues, dixie, and it all came from the church. When I went to church, I would see the sisters and brothers doing the same beat.

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.

You want to figure out how you want to play the guitar; what your niche would be. Well you just start digging deeper. When you're digging deeper in rock and roll you're on a freight train heading straight for the blues.

I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.

I think you can hear the Delta blues thing in something like the intro to 'Heaven in This Hell,' which has that down-home acoustic riff.

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

I would listen to Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, and I would listen to how they played their riffs, and after I taught myself that, I taught myself to play my own kind of stuff.

Ever since I was a little kid and first heard Jimmy Reed's 'Honey, Don't Let Me Go,' the blues has been in my blood.

I'm not a super blues player, but I was exposed to the Texas blues sound while I was growing up, and that definitely rubbed off on me.

I've purposely made my music to be challenging and different. There's some electronics, R&B, blues, Motown, country, jazz and lots of soul.