Best 67 quotes in «blues quotes» category

For all the hard times and tough challenges I faced during different periods of my life, I think I was lucky or blessed or both. When things looked bleak, a good guide would appear to set me straight. Someone once asked me about the villains who got in my way, the bad guys who wanted to trip me up or take me out. I don't remember any. Maybe it's my nature to remember the good and forget the bad, or maybe it's my destiny to lock onto the righteous for help.

Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important, that made it tell a story that wasn’t in the words – a story of despair, of loneliness, of frustration. It was a story that all of them knew by heart and had always known because they had learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.

I could see the blues was about survival.

I apply the warrior energy to the blues by tapping into the ancient job of the griot class.That wasn’t a job you did because someone said you had to do it;you did it because that’s what you did. It was your right as a person.In terms of warriorship,you had to stand up and do what was right,what you were born to do…… In warriorship you have to be very present,very aware of where you are,where you’ve been and where you’re going. Part of what a warrior does,the compassion and generosity of warriorship,is to get the door open and hold it open for other people to come through.That means the warrior is often out there alone. Sometimes the door closes behind you and you don’t know it happened.Then you have to stop,put the guitar down,go back and get a wedge,and get the door open again,so..people can hear the music. You can’t be afraid,no matter what’s going on.” Taj Mahal Autobiography of A Bluesman

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn't have his talent - or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka's soul. Even if I didn't follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He'd entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

I'm a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there's no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn't help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I'd follow forever.

I had hooked up my iPod to the speakers. The air was filled with the raw, sexy purr of Etta James. "The thing that's great about the blues," I told Luke, pausing to sip from my glass of wine, "is that it's about feeling, loving, wanting without the brakes on. No one's brave enough to live that way. Except maybe musicians.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

i don't want to give the impression that I fault my father. I don't. The truth is that he's one of my heroes. He's monumental to me. I believed - and still do - that a man must stand in the door of his home and let the wolf get him before the wolf gets his family. The wolf never got my father or his family, and I admire Daddy's guts. He never slacked off work or lied to me or shrugged his responsibilities. He dealt with his family from a distance, but was available, when needed. Eventually I'd do the same. I don't know whether I was copying him or whether, by coincidence, my work, like Daddy's, simply kept me away. All I know is that in many ways, big and small, I've followed my father.

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about…. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either.

I struggle with words. Never could express myself the way I wanted. My mind fights my mouth, and thoughts get stuck in my throat. Sometimes they stay stuck for seconds or even minutes. Some thoughts stay for years; some have stayed hidden all my life. As a child, I stuttered. What was inside couldn't get out. I'm still not real fluent. I don't know a lot of good words. If I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I'd have a tough time explaining my innocence. I'd stammer and stumble and choke up until the judge would throw me in jail. Words aren't my friends. Music is. Sounds, notes, rhythms. I talk through music. Maybe that's why I became a loner, someone who loves privacy and doesn't reveal himself too easily. My friendliness might fool you. Come into my dressing room and I'll shake your hand, pose for a picture, make polite small talk. I'll be as nice as I can, hoping you'll be nice to me. I'm genuinely happy to meet you and exchange a little warmth. I have pleasant acquaintances with thousands of people the world over. But few, if any, really know me. And that includes my own family. It's not that they don't want to; it's because I keep my feelings to myself. If you hurt me, chances are I won't tell you. I'll just move on. Moving on is my method of healing my hurt and, man, I've been moving on all my life. Now it's time to stop. This book is a place for me to pause and look back at who I was and what I became. As I write, I'm seventy hears old, and all the joy and hurts, small and large, that I've stored up inside me...well, I want to pull 'em out and put 'em on the page. When I've been described on other people's pages, I don't recognize myself. In my mind, no one has painted the real me. Writers have done their best, but writers have missed the nitty-gritty. Maybe because I've hidden myself, maybe because I'm not an easy guy to understand. Either way, I want to open up and leave a true account of who I am. When it comes to my own life, others may know the cold facts better than me. Scholars have told me to my face that I'm mixed up. I smile but don't argue. Truth is, cold facts don't tell the whole story. Reading this, some may accuse me of remembering wrong. That's okay, because I'm not writing a cold-blooded history. I'm writing a memory of my heart. That's the truth I'm after - following my feelings, no matter where they lead. I want to try to understand myself, hoping that you - my family, my friends, my fans - will understand me as well. This is a blues story. The blues are a simple music, and I'm a simple man. But the blues aren't a science; the blues can't be broken down like mathematics. The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.

I thought of the many times I saw that little boy in the azure eyes. The many times I wanted to protect him...save him. Ryker's eyes could turn from sky blue to storm clouds in seconds!

I wasn't taught to hate white people. That dead body hanging from the platform broke the heart and wounded the spirit of every black man and woman who passed by. But I suspected that it also hurt right-thinking white people. Both parents had spoken well of fair-minded white people - my namesake, Jim O'Reilly, and Flake Cartledge - so I knew better than to blame a whole race for the rotten deeds of a few. When some blacks talked about whites as devils, I could see the source of their wrath. I could still see the dead man outside the courthouse on the square. But I couldn't turn the fury into hatred. Blind hatred, my mother had taught me, poisons the soul. I kept hearing her say, 'If you're kind to people, they'll be kind to you.

Love caught me with my pants down, watering skeleton flowers and humming the blues.

Moment by moment, in life's winter life froze Echoing a history of blues, a milestone rose

Night after night on starry wings Night lovers soared so high Miles apart, across the oceans Their love forgot to sigh In heavenly flight’s timelessness That highest height treasured Into the deepest of all blues Their depth of love measured. From the poem 'The Ballad of Night Lovers

No les interesa la pintura. Catherine Guinness [véase Introducción] no se puso pesada hasta el último día, cuando empezó con esa cosa tan fastidiosa que hacen los ingleses de preguntar y preguntar: «¿Qué es exactamente el pop art?». Era como cuando entrevistamos a ese chico del blues, Albert King, para Interview, y ella le preguntó: «¿Qué es exactamente el soul?».

[O]ne can see, perhaps, how "perfect" Christianity was in that sense. It took the slave's mind off Africa, or material freedom, and proposed that if the black man wished to escape the filthy paternalism and cruelty of slavery, he wait, at least, until he died, when he could be transported peacefully and majestically to the Promised Land.

Rats! It's rainy outside, And to be a good fella Invite a smile so wide Nobody needs umbrella!

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Sometimes I ask myself how autumn smells? My answer: it's the smell of the autumn leaves firework and red wine.

Starlight is best felt at noon...

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.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn't have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.

The guitar breathed. It inhaled and exhaled, and music filled the shop as the instrument picked the heartbreak of generations.

The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where we’re bound.

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

T was in a blue mood , his open reflections on the isloation of his life floating like Jazz notes under a "pink moon

We start our lives with blues . . . with music. It's our first language. It's the rhythm of the womb. It's your mama's heartbeat inside your head.

When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

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.

In the early days of slavery, Christianity's sole purpose was to propose a metaphysical resolution for the slave's natural yearnings for freedom, and as such, it literally made life easier for him. The secret African chants and songs were about Africa, and expressed the African slave's desire to return to the land of his birth. The Christian Negro's music became an an expression of his desire to "cross Jordan" and "see his Lord.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

I value individuals and societies. I care about those who are not born yet. That is the reason for my joys and blues.

I've never met God, but I've heard the blues.

My mama used to say the blues is an ailment that don't like no sunshine in the room.

Nothing consoles like the blues.

Now listen for your song. Everybody’s got a song. When I used to chase the Trane— John Coltrane that is— he used to tell me, ‘If I know a man’s sound, I know the man.’ Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?

Screw the mid-life crisis Go have a mid-life spa day A mid-life quickie A midlife tiramisu But whatever you do DON'T give in to mid-life blues!

Stop thinking about the steps. There are no moves in blues, only movement. Just listen to the music,” Matt whispered into my ear. I let go, softening into his arms. The sways became steps, and without even realising, I was dancing.

The corpse is too gentle, With a touch, so parental, I dare not refuse, With a lot to lose, I miss the ruse, The songs, the blues,

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.

The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever i find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

You better get it while you can You better get it while you can If you wait too long, it'll all be gone And you'll be sorry then It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor And it's the same for a woman or a man From the cradle to the crypt Is a mighty short trip So you better get it while you can