I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base.
With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.
The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.
From the first album, we've had songs like 'The Jack' that are blues based. We also did it in 'Ride On,' where we went into the blues.
Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.
I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.
I love the language of, you know, the old black country man with a blues guitar and... boots and the quick banter.
'Basmati Blues' deals with a great social issue, GMOs, but it's told through love and song and dance.
The blues is losing someone you love and not having enough money to immerse yourself in drink.
I started singing on the radio in Los Angeles. I sang blues, but I would tend toward country blues.
The first time I ever heard the blues, my parents had a stack of records that they weren't using anymore. I found them when I was ten; I didn't know what it was. But I found Lightnin' Hopkins.
When I was a kid, we didn't have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.
What did we play in the Harry Dean Stanton Band? It was old blues and country - all covers. I never wrote anything.
The blues is something separate from what I do. They connect at certain spots, but blues is different. I wouldn't put it in with what my career has been. That would be a whole separate wing.
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.
The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.
I will sing happy songs, and I do sing happy songs, but the stuff that's going to move me and going to make me close my eyes is always the blues.
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.
My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.
When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
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.
Lorne finally said, Do the Blues Brothers thing. The response was amazing. People went nuts.
I grew up in the South with my father; blues and country, that's always been my core. But I had it in me not to do what was expected. I wanted to find my own footing.
The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.
I like to listen the blues and some classical.
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 come from a democratic world. My world is moderate Democrats, Reagan-type Democrats if you want, the blues or whatever you call them, the Blue Dogs. That's been my world, historically.
I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist.
I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music.
I realized I was tired of singing about trees and flowers. I wanted to sing about real life. From then on, nobody could tell me anything was better than blues.
When I began my career, I was constantly referred to as the kid who could play the blues.
Before I left, I opened a lot of doors for a lot of people to play the blues.
But my big thing was always the blues.
The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins.
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.
