Quotes about blues

I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

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.

Everybody thinks I'm, like, a bad boy. I've had my day, but I just sit at home and play the blues mostly.

It was a time after 'Lady Sings the Blues' and 'Mahogany' and all those romantic movies: I became this romantic figure on the street in a very special way.

What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categoriesthat restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.

Blues are the songs of despair, but gospel songs are the songs of hope.

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

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.

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.

And a ride in a hearse tells us we’re all close to that final cruise . . . when the body dies and we move on. It’s just the body, man. It’s just the body. The soul’s already gone. So don’t be afraid of a dead body absent a soul. It’s empty, man. No resident. What you need to worry about is a living body that’s lost its soul. Now that is scary, man.” - Funk N. Wagnalls, owner of the Grim Reapers auto lot, a character in Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues.

John will never forsake the weak and the helpless, nor fail to bring hope to the hopeless. That is what they believe, and so they do not worry. They go on and laugh and sing. Things are bound to come out right tomorrow. That is the secret of Negro song and laughter.

After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue.She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea a

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't wanta do any Blues or any sad songs.

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.

I have heartaches, I have blues. No matter what you got, the blues is there. 'Cause that's all I know - the blues. And I can sing the blues so deep until you can have this room full of money and I can give you the blues.

My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

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.

When I think of music, I think of music in its totality, complete. From the lowest blues to the highest symphony, you know, so what I'd like to do is exemplify each style of as many periods as I can possibly do.

From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

I'm very lucky that people are able to say, 'Oh, that's that Moody Blues guy!' I'm very fortunate with that. That's all. Without the songs, I think, I'd just be a pretty average karaoke singer. In the end, it comes down to the songs: the strength of the songs.

The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

I was in a rock band; I was my own folk singer; I was in a death metal band for a very short time; I was in a cover band, a jazz band, a blues band. I was in a gospel choir.

One thing the blues ain't, is funny.

While the House of Blues slogan has been 'In blues we trust,' its stages are usually filled with more reliable moneymakers - Neil Diamond and A Tribe Called Quest among them.

Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.

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.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

Your muse ain't singin' on your MTV? Can't even see him on your HD TV?

Starlight is best felt at noon...

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

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music.

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.

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

She's no lady. Her songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains. Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place shouts out how true it all is.

At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man's example would be my life's work.

For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.

These babies ain’t just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

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 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

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.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its

- Why is depression the blues and not the grays? - Because racer!-Jarod Kintz and Stefan D

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

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.

You play me with your jazz & leave me with the blues.

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.

Let the blue of the sky and ocean take your blue away when you feel blue

And here's to the blues, the real blues— where there's a hint of hope in every cry of desperation.

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

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDEDFOR THE EXISTENCE OF GODWAS MUSIC

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

You got infinite channels and limitless rhymes, but the riddles of livin' stay undefined?

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

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?

Night after night on starry wingsNight lovers soared so highMiles apart, across the oceansTheir love forgot to sighIn heavenly flight’s timelessnessThat highest height treasuredInto the deepest of all bluesTheir depth of love measured.From the poem 'The Ballad of Night Lovers

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.

Rats! It's rainy outside,And to be a good fellaInvite a smile so wideNobody needs umbrella!

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

Musically, he was like an old man in a boy's skin.

Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blu

The guitar poured out its soul, its history, its dreams, its pain, its victories, its secrets. The guitar’s strings purred with blues and ended with a haunting solitary song with no lyrics.

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

A real musician ain’t gonna choose his own guitar like an evil master choosing his slave. The guitar will choose his master and when he does, you’ll know it.