Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.
Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.
You know the days when you get the mean reds? Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues? Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?
Even with Neptune City, I feel like if you strip down all the arrangements, I feel like each of my songs is always going to be, at its core, either a country song or a blues song.
I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good - he's rock's #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us
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.
Benny [Carter] opened the eyes of a lot of producers and studios, so that they could understand that you could go to blacks for other things outside of blues and barbecue. He's a total musician. He was the pioneer, he was the foundation. He made it possible for that doubt to be taken away.
Them pains, when blues pains grab you, you'll sing the blues right.
If you're going to get into music, you've got to learn the 12-bar blues.
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.
No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.
In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.
I'm certain that it was an incredible gift for me to not only be friends with some of the greatest blues people who've ever lived, but to learn how they played, how they sang, how they lived their lives, ran their marriages, and talked to their kids.
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.
Being a blues singer is like being black two times.
So the blues player, he ain't worried and bothered, but he's got something for the worried people.
I would sing the blues if I had the blues.
I need you like the blues needs the pain.
That's what Tina Turner did, too - sang blues up-tempo - and they called it rock 'n' roll.
Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.