When I was growing up, I would go hang out with older guys at night in blues clubs.
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 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 knew Paul when he was in the Beatles. We did the second Beatles British tour with the Moody Blues. And we became friends. I went to a couple of the sessions for the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ album, we went to parties together, we went to see Jimi Hendrix together.
I don’t even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.
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.
Blues and jazz are such a root to music.
My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.
I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I’m 80.
I’ve always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.
When we were starting, the only old guys you’d see on stage were blues guys. They played every night, feast or famine, skint, rich, in fashion and out. You didn’t have to ask them about their lives, their dreams, it was written on their faces: that’s who they were and that’s what they did.
I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.
I will argue with anyone in New York: we have the best pizza in Chicago and the best blues.
When I play, maybe ‘Back o’ Town Blues,’ I’m thinking about one of the old, low-down moments – when maybe your woman didn’t treat you right. That’s a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, ‘I got another mule in my stall.’
My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.
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.
I think it will always be around it just takes one person to make people aware of the blues.
Then I started checking out blues albums from the library and playing the harp along with them.
As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It’s not a style that’s difficult to pick up. It’s purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
Some of my favorite films are musicals, like ‘Walk the Line,’ ‘The Rose’ and ‘Lady Sings the Blues.’ I just love the way the music and the story fuel each other.
After ‘The Blues Brothers,’ I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly.
The blues style – moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful – developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn’t the case anymore.
Even though I was a rock ‘n’ roll fan, hearing the raw blues was like listening to music on a much deeper kind of level.
What you have to understand is that blues… it’s in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you’re playing it like it’s an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
My musical education was grounded in blues and Chicago blues – John Lee Hooker and Otis Redding.
As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.
All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of ’em sang blues.
But my big thing was always the blues.
But of course it’s different now, the blues is no longer blues, it’s green now.
As you grow older, you learn to appreciate all the artistry. I’m actually on my way back to the blues, you know, that my mothers and fathers liked.
I wanna record these girls individually. And then, I wanna cut a blues album on me. But all of it, original stuff, you know. When I listen to the blues today, it’s like they all sounds similar. I wanna do something different, to try to add to the blues flavor.
I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music.
Blues purists may hate what I do sometimes because it’s a little dirtier.
One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.
The thing with me is, about that – about rock and all that – years and years of crate-digging, listening to old music, you kind of start to connect the dots. And I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together, which is pretty much the blues. And everything soul or funk kind of starts with that.
I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It’s either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there’s always a buzzing beneath you.
Logically, when you talkin’ about folk music and blues, you find out it’s music of just plain people.
Having pop sensibilities from my past and also being a lead blues and sort of rock guitarist allowed me to bring that kind of beachy rock groove.
One critic called me nothing but a blues singer, as though that was a slight. That is the highest compliment there is.
If I’m going to do blues, it’s going to be a typical Jimmy Rushing record.
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.
Blacks in America want to forget about slavery – the stigma, the shame. If you can’t be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.
All the great shows owe a lot to ‘Hill Street Blues.’
I used to play too with a boy who played a saxophone. We didn’t play no blues, we’d play a lot of love songs – ‘Stardust’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Out Cold Again’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’, ‘Stars Fell On Alabama’, a lot of different stuff.
I like blues but it is music I am too ignorant to understand.
I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.
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.
Susie Waggoner in ‘Miami Blues’ is just such a sweetheart, such an innocent. When I watch that, I really feel like I’m watching Susie Waggoner. I don’t really see myself. And there’s a simplicity to it that I really like.
I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.
The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It’s a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.
The next thing I knew, I was out of the service and making movies again. My first picture was called, GI Blues. I thought I was still in the army.
It was the early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock ‘n’ Roll.
We come from a generation where the music was very innovative, a lot of it coming out of blues and influenced by blues: the idea was that you would jam on things, and you’d try things out. You took a journey, and you took a left turn, and you experimented live right there in the moment.
Mostly, whenever I’m booked to do instruction, I just play a little bit and get people to ask questions. We’ll play some music for ’em, ’til somebody hollers out, ‘Play ‘Milk Cow Blues’ or ‘Play ‘San Antonio Rose.’ We play requests and demonstrate our music.
Rip Rig + Panic that I joined, they were really influenced by jazz and blues and punk. So I think what happened from punk, which was kind of DIY, was that it created a kind of creative place that was kind of without limits, in a way.
Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In ‘Pony Blues’ and ‘Peavine Blues,’ he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.
The difference between blues, jazz, rock n’ roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It’s scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
