I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music.
Aaron Neville
I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.
Abigail Washburn
I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Adrian Mitchell
Free music, to me, is music without boundaries. It's music that... says you don't have to play a blues in three chord change. See what I'm saying? Music that can go from any range.
Al Green
Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it's not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.
Al Jarreau
Listen, man: I am not the industrial godfather, king, whatever. I don't relish that title. I don't like it. I think it's limiting. I do country, I do blues. I don't just go straight.
Al Jourgensen
I'm done with industrial. Seriously, my iPod collection at home has no industrial music on it; it's strictly jazz, blues and country.
He's written some great songs. I thought that 'Blues Man' was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.
Alan Jackson
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
Alan Lomax
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
I moved from Chicago to New York in 1984 for 'Biloxi Blues.' In 1989, my wife and our then-baby daughter moved to Los Angeles to try to get in television.
Alan Ruck
When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
Albert Murray
The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.
A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.
The musicians that didn't know music could play the best blues. I know that I don't want no musicians who know all about music playin' for me.
Alberta Hunter
Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.
I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.
Alex Chilton
Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
Alex Clare
Winter blues are cured every time with a potato gratin paired with a roast chicken.
Alex Guarnaschelli
The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.
Alexis Korner
The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.
I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.
I had always intended to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. I don't suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so.
Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.
I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.
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.
My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.
When I first started playing, I plunked away just like everyone else. During the Sixties I played in a blues band for a few years, and I liked it. It wasn't until I was playing for a while that I made the decision to change my style from a percussive to more of a legato approach. I just wanted a different sound.
My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
Strangely enough, I wasn't into fast guitarists. I preferred Peter Green's subtle touch. I saw him with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers at the Marquee Club in London and was very impressed. He was the only guitarist I've ever seen to turn the volume control on his guitar down during a solo.
That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.
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.
I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.
Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.
I love the blues, but I love a lot of music.
I'd been watching documentaries about early rock where white artists took 'race records' from blues and soul musicians to achieve mass appeal. I wanted to flip that and do an EP covering only white artists.
That's why I loved Dinah Washington. She sung jazz, but they called her the Queen of the Blues. She had the control and sophistication of jazz in her note selection and how to attack a song or certain lines, but then attacked it with a painful force of blues behind it. That's why I admired her so much, because of that versatility.
Blues is a big part of rock and roll. The best rock and roll got its birth in the blues. You hear it in Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.
From the first album, we've had songs like 'The Jack' that are blues based. We also did it in 'Ride On,' where we went into the blues.
I would be on dates with guys, and the radio would be on, and if the Moody Blues song came on I couldn't concentrate on the guy; I would go straight into the music.
So, rap has that quality, for youth anyway; it's a kind of blues element. It's physical, almost gymnastic. It speaks to you organically. Rap grows out of what young people really are today, not only black youth, but white - everybody.
You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
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.
I grew up listening to blues and rock n' roll and other music, but, legitimately, the Stones is one of my favorite bands in the world.
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.
The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.
My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.
