The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.
The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.
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.
I don't wanta do any Blues or any sad songs.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
Well, I don't know how they define that. But they have this Texas blues thing blown kinda out of proportion. I am a Long John Hunter blues, before and after, that's what I am.
The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.
I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.
God, I'm just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?
The only time it dominates is during a solo, or when we play a low blues and I put figures in behind Eric's vocals. There's never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.
It's a blue album, but it's not a blues album. I'm not pretending all of a sudden now I'm blues.
The blues is played everywhere. There's no place I've been where they don't have blues or aren't interested in blues.
See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.
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.
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.
People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
So yeah, I am definitely a blues man at heart.
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 like blues but it is music I am too ignorant to understand.
Mick Jagger has been an idol of mine since I was 10 years old. Through his music, he has taught me so much about rock n' roll, but also about the blues and about the experience of live music, going to several Rolling Stones shows, growing up.
When you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on.
Songs like 'Outfit' and 'Decoration Day' and 'Dress Blues,' those were good songs, but the output wasn't as consistent in those days.
I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
I remember my brother came home with a bass and played a blues solo on it. I just went insane for days afterwards learning that.
I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.
It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.
My musical taste has always been wide. I started out as a folky before I moved on to blues and soul.
I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
I really enjoy spending Sunday evenings with friends, because Sunday evenings are always frightening. You are obsessed by the fact that you are working again the next day. And sometimes you get the blues.
My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.
As a comedian, you're kind of like a blues musician; you have to live a little bit.
I've never been an all-black girl. I like pinks and blues and greens. If you come over to my closet, you'll be able to find a rainbow of things to wear.
Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests.
