Quotes about the Blues
A Small List of Blues Quotes

The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.
John Lee Hooker

With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump.
Louis Jordan

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.
B. B. King

The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
Alan Lomax

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about jazz and blues.
John Mayall

You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
Van Morrison

In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.
Jelly Roll Morton

White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there.
Ma Rainey

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.
Bonnie Raitt

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.
Keith Richards

I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.
Otis Rush

The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.
Jimmy Rushing

Blues music is becoming more and more popular than it ever was. I'm always meeting people on the road that are really young, and are guitar players. male and female.
Mick Taylor

Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.
George Thorogood

When you think of blues, all you think about is crying guitar like B.B. King's guitar. You think about someone crying that their woman's gone. And how bad life is and all that. Why can't it be something happy with the blues? Why can't it have a hip-hop beat to which you can do the dances of today ?
Ike Turner

Simple music is the hardest music to play and blues is simple music.
-Albert Collins

But between sets I'd sneak over to the black places to hear blues musicians. It got to the point where I was making my living at white clubs and having my fun at the other places.
Stevie Ray Vaughan

The Blues is Life.
-Brownie McGhee

“The blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad”
 Leon Redbone

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.
Muddy Waters

I've always wanted the sound of Muddy Waters' early records - only louder
-Eric Clapton

I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.
Muddy Waters

You gotta have heart in you want to make it in this business.
-Dexter Gordon

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.
Luther Allison

The history of a people is found in its songs.
-George Jellinek

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don't live it you don't have it. Young people have forgotten to cry the blues. Now they talk and get lawyers and things.
Big Bill Broonzy

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristics.
-James Weldon Johnson

Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said, 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show, and they came up afterwards and said, 'You didn't play one sad song.'
Buddy Guy

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
-Charlie Parker

I just like the blues better than rock 'n' roll.
Johnny Winter

Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear.
-Billy Gibbons

The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.
Johnny Winter

Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, You learn notes to play to the music of your soul.
-Katie Greenwood

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.
Muddy Waters