Rhythm and blues is about what life is, it’s about being able to talk heartbreak and understanding that people go through it, not about this fantasy in how much you’re spending.
My template for most songs is ‘Is this inspiring?’ and with the blues it so often is.
The R&B will always prevail. It will always last. The blues will always last.
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.
As soon as I started writing the first batch, I had a vision. I saw me on stage playing a certain type of music. I want to take these blues melodies over aggressive guitars. I heard the sound I wanted to make. I knew what I wanted to do. It wasn’t ever there before.
I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It’s all that. So I’m born in the wrong era and I just don’t fit into the 21st century at all.
Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is a total take-over of our lives.
I like the blues a lot. I grew up on it.
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.
I would sing the blues if I had the blues.
If I’m at a party and someone puts on a Blues Brothers tape, I tend to go nuts.
Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.
I’m like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands, I don’t know what they are talking about. I’m into rock n’ roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but my brother and sister.
I’m a rock singer, but I love soul, I love blues, and I love theatrical stuff, too, like theatrical rock like Queen and Meat Loaf.
I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way – I didn’t know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn’t enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
I would think, to me, growing up in the south, growing up with all the gospel music, singing in the church and having that rhythm and blues – the blues background was my big inspiration.
I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
If nothing else, we grew up loving the old blues artists and Ray Charles.
I’m primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly ‘Frankenstein’ had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there’s one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.
I base myself in African-derived music. Blues is one of the modern forms of African music.
After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and… boots and the quick banter.
I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It’s in New Orleans music, it’s in jazz, it’s in country music, it’s in gospel.
People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.
I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.
Cinderella obviously got caught up in the hair metal scene, but they were such a blues band. And such a good live band.
My take on rap is driven by straightforward American southern rock and blues.
Getting to play the blues has been transcendant for me. I can’t say if my finest hour is yet to come, you want to make a dent in this world, well I do anyway.
I grew up listening to Patsy Cline. I was a huge Patsy Cline fan. I still am. Even though she’s considered country, I think of her more as a blues singer. She’s got a great blues voice, and she has such an amazing story, which I always loved.
I come from a democratic world. My world is moderate Democrats, Reagan-type Democrats if you want, the blues or whatever you call them, the Blue Dogs. That’s been my world, historically.
Well, I don’t know how they define that. But they have this Texas blues thing blown kinda out of proportion. I am a Long John Hunter blues, before and after, that’s what I am.
When you’re 12 and, you know, slightly overweight and – for lack of a better word – white, and you’re playing blues, you get a lot of press.
There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues – the blues we used to have when we had no money.
It’s a blue album, but it’s not a blues album. I’m not pretending all of a sudden now I’m blues.
We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.
I listen to all kinds of music myself; it can range from practically anything: Opera, Jazz, to Blues, good Pop, just about anything.
When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad’s blues. It’s music from the underground, and it’s real, and it’s written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.
I know that Filipinos will enjoy ‘Gangnam Blues’ because it has a universal message that will resonate with everyone.
The one thing I loved about blues and soul was the way they taught the world how to express such deep feelings.
I grew up listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and lots of blues, R&B and Motown.
My definition of the blues is the naked cry of the human heart longing to be in union with God.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.
I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n’ roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music – mainly Bach, Vivaldi.
James Cotton is a real blues guy, and he played with Muddy Waters, and it surprised me that they would want me to make a record with them, that he called me to do this record. I’d never done anything like that before. But I love blues, so I was very happy.
My dad was good friends with the Bad Medicine Blues Band – one of the only blues bands in Fargo, as you can imagine! He took me out to see them play when I was 12 years old and I was really inspired by their guitar player, Ted Larsen.
Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently.
I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.
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.
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.
You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing – it was a feeling.
I really enjoy spending Sunday evenings with friends, because Sunday evenings are always frightening. You are obsessed by the fact that you are working again the next day. And sometimes you get the blues. I always decide to spend it with friends. It’s very nice.
He’s written some great songs. I thought that ‘Blues Man’ was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.
When I was young, I wanted to be the greatest blues singer of all time. I wrecked my education and left home for it.
Most of the songs I sing have that blues feeling in it. They have that sorry feeling. And I don’t know what I’m sorry about. I don’t.
Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.
Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn’t even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that’s been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.
The blues – the sound of a sinner on revival day.
Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn’t get much where I come from.
There was a great blues scene in Belfast during the late ’60s.
I’ve only dyed my hair blond once, after ‘Varsity Blues.’
The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.
