Quotes & Sayings About Blues

I wanted to know everything about the blues. I think it constantly changes for me. — Jason Momoa

It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it. — Steve Winwood

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is. — Brian Eno

Do you think you love that fellow?"
"I don't know." She closed her eyes, but the tears overflowed nevertheless. "All I know is that he opened a door into a whole new world I never even knew existed. I've stepped through that door, and I cant return.
( ... )
Its like being blind from birth and then one day suddenly being able to see. And not just see, but to witness the sun rising in all her glory across the azure sky. The dusky lavenders and blues lightening to pinks and reds, spreading across the horizon until the entire earth is lit. Until one has to blink and fall to ones knees in awe at the light.
( ... )
Even if one were to be made blind again in the next instant, one would ever after remember and know what was missed. What could be. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Teenagers did not have, before rock 'n' roll and rhythm-and-blues - they did not have any type of music they could call their own once they got over 4 or 5 years old until they were well into their 20's and considered adults. — Sam Phillips

You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now. — Ken Grimwood

In general, those from outside the southern culture built a style around exaggerations of southern music, and missed the lonesome hillbilly and blues feel that was its core. In the quest for abandon, they also failed to understand that southern music is lazy music - at any tempo. — Colin Escott

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed. — B.B. King

You know the evil that men do, hell is where the men go.
We snatched him by his hands and feet and threw him out the window:
"Up, up, and away cause I don't play, clown,
Buck, buck, buck, take that with you on the way down."
I'm hoping you got springs and wings on your shoes,
But you lose, because I got the Ill Street Blues. — Kool G Rap

All of my favorite songs can bring me to tears. Some are rock, some are blues, some are love ballads. That's why I play music - to touch other people as I have been touched. — Kelly Blatz

Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently. — Otis Rush

In My Shoes They do not understand my pain, They say I should be strong, They say that it's not right, To grieve for far too long, They say I need to get back up, They say in time I'll heal, But they are not the ones, Who feel the way I feel, Some days I want to lie in bed, And stay there all day long, What's the point of getting up? What's the point? You've gone? They say things will get better, That time will heal my blues, Maybe they would understand, If they walked in my shoes. — John Connor

Listen to positive music, watch positive videos or movies, hang out with positive, upbeat people. The last thing a blue mood need is more blues. Don't be volunteer victim; be a fighter. — Les Brown

I've always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that. — Harry Seidler

I never liked blues and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry. — Johnny Ramone

The blues have always had some of the best times, best feelings I've ever had. — Keanu Reeves

Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose
Won't you let me go down in my dreams? — James Taylor

The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity — Joe Perry

The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different. — John Lee Hooker

Glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively. — Gillian Flynn

The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric's vocals. There's never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together. — Alan Price

SKAGWAY BLUES CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER — Liliana Shelbrook

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

I think it will always be around it just takes one person to make people aware of the blues. — Johnny Winter

Thought is pleasing. Her room is small, neat, and girlish: all whites, creams, and baby blues, and bathed in the soft glow of her bedside lamp. It's also a little empty, but I spy — E.L. James

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first. — Van Morrison

You hear lots of notes, don't you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there's not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between. — David Mutti Clark

In blues music, there's a lot of borrowing, so it's often difficult to identify the originator of a song. — Henry Rollins

But now they must've worn off. He thought he may have groaned. It was hard to be sure in his kinda awake state. He tried to move his hand and yelled out at the pain. Oh yeah, fractured wrist. "Easy there, bad boy." Oh my lord. Curtis would know that sexy whisky-dripped baritone anywhere. He'd force open his own eyes now just to see those green eyes looking down at him. He didn't care if his head exploded into a million pieces. It'd be worth it for this sight. "Open those beautiful baby blues," Genesis said in a hushed drawl. Curtis fought through the fog and the pain and cracked open his eyes. He blinked a few times at the harsh light above his head but he kept on until Genesis' gorgeous face was in focus. Curtis' lips parted in a smile. What on earth was he doing there? He believed it was a Monday now. Genesis should be in school. "Gen. — A.E. Via

We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands. — Michael Giles

Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off. — Bonnie Raitt

For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited - limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa. — Irving Wallace

A lot of blues guitarists play with only three fingers, and they can't figure out certain runs that require the use of their little fingers. Classical training is good for that. — Ritchie Blackmore

I tend to play a lot of blues things at home, because most blues things are basically within a 12-bar pattern. — Marc Bolan

One thing they don't tell you 'bout the blues when you got 'em, you keep on fallin' 'cause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses. — Maggie Nelson

And now I know that you're the one
I've waited my whole life for
You're budding leaves turning green in spring
You're the fresh breath of air that summer brings
You're the autumn sky painted in rainbow hues
You're the wintry ocean dancing in shimmering blues
You're the air I breahte
You're the water I drink
You're the fire inside me
The earth under my feet
You're the one — Kendall Grey

If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. — Daniel J. Levitin

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do. — David Byrne

After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue.
She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L'Heure Bleue. For me they signify love. — Susan Hubbard

---
He knit his brows as she stared at him. "Do I have a pustule on my face?"
"No." She continued to stare. He may be a bit more time-weathered, but that only served to increase his allure. And his eyes. Lord, his eyes were the same crystal blues that could pierce through her soul.
Tilting his chin up, he folded his arms. "Then why are ye looking at me like that?"
"I want to remember."
His gaze softened. "I've never forgotten."
"Nor have I. — Amy Jarecki

When I discovered Mose Allison I felt I had discovered the missing link between jazz and blues — Ray Davies

Yes, there's a lot of the blues in my playing. — David Gilmour

You play me with your jazz & leave me with the blues. — Curtis Tyrone Jones

Yazoo is the name of an old blues label and also a town in America. I like it because it doesn't mean a thing, it has no immediate connotations. That's what I hate about so many names today - they're so obviously fashionable. — Alison Moyet

Look at the sky. It's not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars! And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes. — Richard Curtis

Johnny Winter is one of the best blues players in the world. He's very underrated. — Ritchie Blackmore

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable. — Janis Joplin

Adderall or Ritalin TYPE 3. Impulsive-Compulsive Addicts SYMPTOMS Combination of types 1 and 2 BRAIN FINDINGS/NEURO-TRANSMITTER ISSUE High ACG plus low PFC/low S and DA SUPPLEMENTS 5-HTP plus green tea and rhodiola MEDICATIONS SSRI plus stimulant TYPE 4. Sad or Emotional Addicts SYMPTOMS Sad or depressed mood, winter blues, carbohydrate cravings, loss of — Daniel G. Amen

I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing. — Nick Cave

If I feel really ugly or unhappy, sometimes I'll choose bright colors so they'll make me feel good. Yellows, pinks, light blues and orange. I just want to feel good all the time if I can. And colors and hairstyles and all that kind of helps out. — Jill Scott

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

The writer loves the fog as it pours in; he loves the sun when the fog pours out. The rest of California is Beach Boys country, but San Francisco has that moody thing going on, those blues notes wrapped in moisture, an atmosphere that tempers California dreaming and makes life more real. The fog brings reality, but it is still a California reality, one spent outdoors the whole year round. — Eric Maisel

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family. — Alexis Korner

Blues ain't never going anywhere. It can get slow, but it ain't going nowhere. — David Edwards

There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland. — Johnny Winter

It's a circus out there, mama
and your baby's got the sideshow blues. — Todd Snider

You might say that the universe plays the blues. — David Byrne

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues. — Jess Row

Your muse ain't singin' on your MTV? Can't even see him on your HD TV? — David Mutti Clark

As for their houses, it is no use looking for them, because they are the exact opposite of our houses. You can see our houses by day but you can't see them by dark. Well, you can see their houses by dark, but you can't see them by day, for they are the colour of night, and I never heard of anyone yet who could see night in the daytime. This does not mean that they are black, for night has its colours just as day has, but ever so much brighter. Their blues and reds and greens are like ours with a light behind them. The palace is entirely built of many-coloured glasses, and is quite the loveliest of all royal residences, — J.M. Barrie

Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth ... There are just cult places like that in the world, like Chicago for the blues or New York for jazz. Nothing sounds the same in Nashville as it does elsewhere. Nashville is the Mecca of country music and everyone knows it. — Roch Voisine

The blues will be blue, and the jealousies green, but when love picks its color it demands to be seen. — Garth Brooks

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things. — Big Bill Broonzy

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies. — Etta James

It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers). — Maya Angelou

l'after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l'interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end. — Alexis Munier

Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope. — Mahalia Jackson

But I did that, and I created another blues scene, another something I can sing about. — Luther Allison

The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history. — Cornel West

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother's aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others. — B.B. King

The bottle is where everything sad or mean or confusing can go. And the blues
it's like that bottle. But in the bottle there's a seed that you let grow. Even in the bottle it can grow big and green. It's full of all those feelings that are in there, but beautiful and growing too. — Heidi W. Durrow

So it's true: Being without Being is blue. — William H Gass

Maybe it's because I'm a designer, but when I am in a state of excitement, everything is so sharp and colorful and amazing, and I can look at blue and I see the yellow in it and the green in it, and the green-blues, the yellow-blues, so. — Tom Ford

It was a great thing for the Blues boys to do in terms of shaving their hair off for me. The whole squad did it. At first I thought it was only going to be a handful of boys, but fair play, they all did it, and a few of the coaches as well. — Matthew Rees

So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues. — Steven Tyler

Read books, discover the blues and don't Tweet. — Bernie Taupin

The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body. — Nick Cave

He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Later he says, "Listen here, you men, / one more thing I'd like to say / Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away. — Tom Franklin

I'm not good enough to be playin' much acoustic guitar onstage. Man, you gotta get so right; I mean, the tones, the feel, the sound. Plus, acoustic blues guitar is just that much harder on the fingers. — Johnny Winter

People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues. — Willie Dixon

People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow ... The blues is about truth-telling. — Alberta Hunter

I haven't sold my soul yet - well, maybe a couple bars of rhythm and blues here and there, — Thomas Pynchon

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues. — Brian Setzer

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music - one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists - for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have. — Imani Perry

A sensible girl would not have been crying, grieving for the boy with the magic in his voice and the blues in his eyes, mourning the loss of something that was a lie-a lie-from beginning to end. — Cinda Williams Chima

The blues is something separate from what I do. They connect at certain spots, but blues is different. I wouldn't put it in with what my career has been. That would be a whole separate wing. — Bob Mould

I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level. — Chuck Close

Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is. — Christian Scott

The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God. — Barbara Hambly

I've always been serious that way, trying to evolve to a more conscious state. Funny thing about that,though. You tweak yourself,looking for more love, less lust, more compassion, less jealousy. You keep tweaking, keep adjusting those knobs until you can no longer find the original settings. In some sense,the original settings are exactly what I'm looking for-a return to the easygoing guy i was before my world got complicated, the nice guy who took things as they came and laughed so hard the blues would blow away in the summer wind. — Bill Withers

Depending on who I am talking about or who's talking through me - if the person is a kind of hip-hop, or rhythm and blues person, or if the person is a kind of old-fashion gothic, meaning gothic attitude, then that will determine what form the poem will take. — Maya Angelou

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. — Ronnie Wood

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat. — Mark Twain

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. — Jack White

When the sweet talkin's done, a man is a two face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night. — Johnny Mercer

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source. — B.B. King

Written on the wall behind them was: 'Blues for the body, food for the soul. — Jennifer Niven

Janis Joplin sings the blues as hard as any black person. — B.B. King

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime. — John Mayer

Maybe it was just the after glow talking. Maybe it was the glow giving me my River blues..but it felt real. And my feeling, pure or not, were the only thing I had to go on. River had manipulated people. And Murdered people. He was wicked. Not as wicked as Brodie, but.. Still wicked. It was better that he was gone. Better he was out of my life. I knew that, logically. What I felt though, deep, deep down in the darkest of my heart, was that I didn't give a damn if River was Evil. I still liked him. Maybe i even kind of love him. And Maybe that made me Wicked too. — April Genevieve Tucholke