If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC
We start our lives with blues . . . with music. It's our first language. It's the rhythm of the womb. It's your mama's heartbeat inside your head.
And here's to the blues, the real blues— where there's a hint of hope in every cry of desperation.
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.
....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.
The music echoes in the emptiness. It reminds us where we came from and where we’re bound.
You got infinite channels and limitless rhymes, but the riddles of livin' stay undefined?
The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.
Now listen for your song. Everybody’s got a song. When I used to chase the Trane— John Coltrane that is— he used to tell me, ‘If I know a man’s sound, I know the man.’ Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?
Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
I was into playing American music, especially the blues.
I'm obsessed with Norah Jones and Amy Winehouse, Etta James. I'm really into blues and R&B type of stuff, '90s hip-hop; that's my jam.
I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.
My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.
Pop music is aspirin and the blues are vitamins.
Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.
I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.
Every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.
