The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.
I prefer a heart player; I prefer someone like a blues player, like Jeff Healey. Jeff Healey I think is tremendous.
Beale Street is a very famous street in the history of America. You know, American music in particular. From the blues to jazz, it’s a connecting city from New Orleans that goes all the way up to Buffalo through New York.
They’re great players. I’m not a Blues Traveler fan, though. I get it, but it’s not for me.
I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
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.
Paul and I were friends, the Moody Blues toured with the Beatles on the second British tour. That developed into me working with Paul, whom I always admired.
But what I like to sing mostly is blues and cabaret style.
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.
I’m an old soul. The blues, especially older blues, is the human element that kind of gives the music soul, and I think that maybe not enough people connect to the blues. It’s a very powerful place to be; and if you can express that to an audience, I think that you can express a lot through that.
You don’t understand what you’re angry about as a young man. You have those young man blues.
I’m John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I’m a rock guy and I’m going to play rock music my whole life.
Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.
My heroes were gospel blues players like Blind Willie Johnson, Charley Patton, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, not whoever was number one.
I love jazz and blues, where there’s a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.
All of my solos are blues based. Even though a lot of my songs get into pop, I wind up going back to the blues. Trying to escape it is like trying to run from the devil.
I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.
When I came to The Moody Blues, we were a rhythm and blues band. I was lousy at rhythm and blues – I think the rest of us were.
To me, country music is like the blues, but it’s something very hip and – I don’t want to say commercial – but it’s very worldly and good listening.
Winter blues are cured every time with a potato gratin paired with a roast chicken.
I started playing ukulele first for 2 years from age 9 to 11 and got my first guitar and got inspired by blues I heard on the radio that turned me on and I started learning myself.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
When I think about Oz, when he was a teenager, I’m just reminded of what an excellent blues voice he had. He had a large voice. When we did the Aynsley Dunbar song ‘Warning’ and ‘Black Sabbath,’ his voice is so right. It’s really round, and it has that pain from within in his voice.
Are you really into pop? Are you really into old country? Blues? If you’re not honest about your influences, then things don’t sound as real as they can be. They’re not as sharp a cheddar cheese as they can be. And I’m trying to be the sharpest cheddar I can be.
That’s where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I’ve failed: They’ve actually convinced college kids that they’re listening to hip music – but it’s just blues twisted a new way – while I’m playing for the college kid’s parents.
My family was a Christian family. But I had to get to Kansas to play the blues.
‘Hairdresser Blues’ was written when I was deep in a ten-year depression that I escaped shortly after recording that album. I don’t like that album.
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.
The old-timers schooled me good. They brainwashed me to respect music, whether we were playing rockabilly or blues or rock and roll.
I’ve gotta stick to my roots, and my roots are blues.
I don’t wanta do any Blues or any sad songs.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that’s like my ‘Blues Brothers’ mission.
Most blues guitar players don’t concentrate on singing and melodies. And forget about the bridge – the bridge doesn’t exist. They go straight for the solo.
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.
Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn’t my music. My music was the blues.
When I began my career, I was constantly referred to as the kid who could play the blues.
I love Yamaha Clavinovas. I have them at home, in the studio and on tour with me. I find them ideal for all sorts of things: silent practice with headphones at home; writing; arranging and… just playing the blues!
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.
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
I’m not a blues singer, I’m a diva.
My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.
I think that the blues is in everything, so it’s not possible to neglect it. You hear somebody go ‘Ooh ooh oooh,’ and that’s the blues. You hear a rock n’ roll song. That’s the blues. Somebody playing a guitar solo? They’re playing the blues.
I was driving to school at Reseda High School – I was a junior, and it was early 1956. I had a ’49 Ford. I was listening to the country station, and ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ comes on… It didn’t sound like the stuff I was hearing on the pop stations.
A long time ago, you couldn’t say what you mean in blues. You had to disguise it, and that’s where the double entendres and humour comes from and that’s where we come from.
I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.
I like to be very girly, with bows and ruffles on the red carpet. I love pastel colours, especially blue. Me and my sister both because of our eyes look good in blues.
The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. It’s cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. It’s not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.
Who’s to say a blues man can’t play rock and roll?
When there’s an imbalance in terms of what people get to hear, then that’s negative. Then blues, jazz, it will die.
If you are feeling some December blues, or even depression, don’t fight it. Instead, do something for yourself. Be reflective. Let the emotions exist. And be encouraged that, like me, you can get to a better place, but it can take time.
I want to speak in the tradition of rhythm and blues and soul music, but also push how it’s dressed and how it’s delivered to the audience. And hopefully that gets embraced by as many people as possible, but the goal isn’t necessarily to speak to everyone. The goal is to get it out as exact as it is in my head.
I listen to top 40, old country, blues… I’m really into Roger Miller.
Purple – I mean, the music and the influence and the subliminal touches range from orchestral conversation to jazz to blues and soul and God knows what. It’s a vast range of expressions.
I was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.
I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist.
I’ve always been a fan of Buddy Guy as a guitarist, as well as Stevie Ray Vaughan and those blues guys. I’d say those are pretty big influences on me.
With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.
When I picked up my guitar, I spent the first day learning the chord E, the second day A, then B7, and all of a sudden, I could play the blues.
When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.
Ray grew up in Chicago so he had the blues, Muddy Waters and all that. He also had classical training. That was pretty cool. That was invoked in the intro to ‘Light My Fire,’ which was very kind of Bach-like.
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.
