I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.
I’m a human being. I feel all emotions. I’m not just happy all the time. Sometimes, I’m sad and feel the blues. Sometimes I even want to feel the blues. Sometimes, you want to feel down.
The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different.
The blues is losing someone you love and not having enough money to immerse yourself in drink.
Elvis deserves a lot of credit for bringing the blues to middle America, not the Vegas stuff. The early stuff, The Sun records, and the first few RCA records. He was wonderful, he had the power, the drive, and he was so dedicated to his music.
I have been influenced by music. I grew up listening to blues, jazz and all.
It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation’s music, why can’t we have our own?
What did we play in the Harry Dean Stanton Band? It was old blues and country – all covers. I never wrote anything.
I think the blues will always be around. People need it.
What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that’s okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can’t ever rest on your laurels.
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.
I didn’t really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn’t really the center for blues.
Do I love the road? Honestly? No – but it’s how I earn my living. I also don’t have the blues, like it’s some kind of fever. The blues is my job. It’s what I do.
I grew up with the Blind Boys’ music. My family owns a music store in Claremont, California, called The Claremont Folk Music Center. I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
Anybody that sings the blues is in a deep pit, yelling for help.
So, maybe you don’t see blues so much in Styx’s music but it is definitely part of Tommy’s early music.
The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.
The music that I first fell in love with was American music, really. Nothing against British acts – I love them and will forever – but on the whole, it was the art of American storytelling in the kind of folk and blues lyrics that, if you scratch a little bit, there’s a heartbreaking story there.
I wanted to play blues. But I wasn’t blue enough. I wasn’t like Muddy Waters, people who really had it hard. In our house, we had food on the table. We were doing well compared to many. So I concentrated on this fun and frolic, these novelties.
I travel light, but always with three key things: Passport, cash and iPod. The latter is perhaps the most key – it keeps me going at the gym or on the plane; I listen to everything from rock to country to blues.
I was 17, and it was my first summer in London as a professional singer. One hot, humid evening, I heard that the Jimi Hendrix Experience was playing in a blues club above a pub in Finsbury Park. I was flat broke and couldn’t afford a ticket, so I went along just to stand outside and listen.
I love good rock’n’roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.
I didn’t grow up on country and blues, I was just a kid listening to VH1 and then I realized I needed to expand my musical horizons. Now I have a deep appreciation for southern heritage music.
Old-school rock bands, and blues bands, too, are kind of a dying breed.
As much as I liked the build-up to Christmas, the week after always socked me with the blues.
Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.
I sang in church growing up. Memphis is the blues capital of the world, we like to say.
Good things are associated with blue, like clear days, more than singing the blues. Just the word ‘blue’ in the singular is full of optimism and positive connotation to most people.
I was determined to create my own identity. My first hits, in fact, were straight-up rhythm and blues. My voice was compared to Aretha Franklin’s – though, for my money, no one compares to Aretha.
Blues, rock, and soul are part of the music I make, but there are Indian influences, too.
I am very excited to be here in Wales and look forward to putting on the Cardiff Blues shirt.
There were times I thought I was going to turn to the blues, but then I’d hear better blues players.
My father’s nephew was the blues musician, Lowell Fulson. Every time he came around, he had a pretty car, a beautiful woman and a slick sharkskin suit. Believe it or not, that’s how I decided I wanted to get into music.
The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me.
I’m a big Bob Dylan fan. I’m also a blues geek.
I’ve always thought Blues Point Tower is one of my best buildings and I stand by that.
I think once I had lived life, once I had failed enough in this lifetime and got back up a thousand times from failing, I really connected to the blues.
I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn’t like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.
I like the style of the deVOL kitchens – shaker style with dark greys and blues, ceramic tiles and metallics dotted around.
It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to make a blues record.
I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.
I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It’s music that feels like home to me.
Hip-hop, which is my generation’s blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
The strange thing is I can’t play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.
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.
One of my reasons for living in California is its close proximity to Mexico. The Latin influence is in every corner of the community. My love of Spanish music hasn’t wavered since the ’50s. I could hear the blues voicing from the Flamanco families and I always dig for inspiration in Latin music.
If I’m soloing, I usually try to start with a theme, which will often stem from the blues.
People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.
I got one of the best sax players in the business – Arno Hecht. He plays with the Uptown Horns and all the great blues bands. He expresses the heart of the Apollo Theatre, let me tell you.
I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched ‘The Blues Brothers’ movie over and over.
Should the Moody Blues be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? That’s absurd. Of course they should be.
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.
Justin Hayward was a teenager when he was drafted into the Moody Blues in 1966. He brought with him one song he had written for his girlfriend. This was called ‘Nights in White Satin,’ which subsequently made a fortune for a lot of people.
Black people have always loved the blues – they basically created the blues.
Actually, I didn’t listen to country music very much in Oklahoma. I listened to blues and rock n’ roll.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties – but I’d never really touched on dark Americana.
I was always taught that Latin, Caribbean people were cousins to me, as well as blues was a cousin to me, as well as Africans were direct relatives to me. It was all a part of my language.
We grew up listening to a variety of music, such as Gospel/Christian, R&B old/new school, jazz, blues, Mozart, Mary Poppins, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, just to name a few. I love opera, too – went to state in high school as a soloist.
I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.
