Easy music on the surface to play. But then you think how do these cats do it? These are weird moves. Where is this coming from? Keith Richards
If you don’t know the blues ... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock-n-roll or any other form of popular music. Keith Richards
I dabbled in things like Howlin’ Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I’d been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues. Jack White
I think the blues will always be around. People need it. Johnny Winter
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. Duke Ellington
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
The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body. Nick Cave
Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, ‘Oh man, this is the stuff.’ It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling. Carlos Santana
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. Tom Petty
The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch. Jon Landau
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard. Bruce Springsteen
I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living. Bonnie Raitt
It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to make a blues record. Hugh Laurie
The one thing the blues don’t get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people’s throat so they got no choice but to listen to it. John Lee Hooker
I’ll never, I’ll never
Get out of these blues alive. John Lee Hooker
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. David Edwards
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
The blues is losing someone you love and not having enough money to immerse yourself in drink. Henry Rollins
Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now – not remotely. Henry Rollins
God, I’m just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know? Joe Cocker
The blues is the music of the devil and we his children. Walter Mosley
By the end of the nineteenth century there was a rich variety of music circulating in the countryside and towns of the south, from fife and drum corps to Minstrel shows. Masters of American Music: Bluesland, 1993
Radio Station KFFA’s King Biscuit Time became the first regularly scheduled blues show in the south. ibid.
The Blues takes you back to the place where it first came to life. Martin Scorsese, The Blues, PBS 2003
This is the one thing they could never take away from black people. ibid.
Northern audiences responded to Lead Belly [Ledbetter]. ibid.
Robert Johnson: dead at twenty-seven, twenty-nine songs and just two known photographs. ibid.
Hooker’s music was born in the Delta that got right to the bone. ibid.
Before the Civil War, slave drums were banned throughout the South. ibid.
You feel that Africa was only a heartbeat away. ibid.
Alan Lomax travelled all over the world and he found and recorded music everywhere he went. I was always there. ibid.
This is the story of an unlikely love affair that was awakened innocently enough in the drabness of Fifties Britain. But by the Seventies had blossomed into a global passion. From its origins as a secret society all the way to the international stage this is what happened when Britain got the blues. Blues Britannia: Can Blue Men Play the Whites? BBC 2011
The guts of rock-n-roll spilled out across Britain in 1957 creating the teenage phenomenon. ibid.
Rock-n-Roll’s earlier doctors now needed a new drug: they discovered the power, depth and authenticity they craved in a music they hadn’t heard before. The very basis of Rock-n-Roll. ibid.
Being a Blues disciple in late Fifties Britain was being part of a hip Masonic lodge. ibid.
The audience was entirely white. ibid.
Perhaps no-one got to know these visiting Blues legends more intimately than Val Wilmer, then only a teenage girl in love with their music. She met them, photographed them, wrote about them and hung out with them, sharing their experience of Britain at close range. ibid.
Alexis Korner established a home for Blues enthusiasts on the outskirts of London ... The Jazz Club in Ealing. ibid.
Brian Jones perhaps played the first slide guitar ever to be heard in Britain at Korner’s Club ... Brian’s group: The Rolling Stones. ibid.
By 1964 British Rhythm & Blues had hijacked every venue in the country. The Animals, a Newcastle-based band, were part of a nationwide Blues explosion. ibid.
Little Red Rooster: televised Ready Steady Go! 20th November 1964. ibid.
In November 1964 the Rolling Stones stamped a new teenage sexiness on the Blues with a hardcore Willie Dixon cover: Little Red Rooster. ibid.
In the early Sixties being ‘with them’ and being desperate to feel something meant knowing something about the American Civil Rights movement and the violent struggles to overcome slavery and starvation. ibid.
Chris Barber had first invited Howlin’ Wolf to the UK in 1962. ibid.
Eric Clapton joined a real blues band – John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton – known as the Beano Album. ibid.
The Holy Trinity known as Cream ... Cream went a bit weird and druggy. ibid.
Blues was subsumed in the heavy mix. ibid.
Champion Jack Dupree never went back. He settled in Halifax and married a Yorkshire girl. ibid.
The Blues is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. It's such simple music it seems timeless. But the Blues does have a history and it keeps changing. Blues America I: Woke Up This Morning, BBC 2014
At the turn of the century the Blues is being played by the poorest people on whatever came to hand. ibid.
Emerging from a dirt-poor background, Bessie Smith at her peak commanded $2,000 a week. ibid.