B. B. King

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

Ignorance is bliss? That’s bull, far as I’m concerned. Because I was making a half a cent a side – one penny for a record. It’s like building buses, for example. If you built this bus for me and I didn’t know anything about it, you could charge me whatever I’d pay for it. Now, which one of us is crazy? Me. And that’s the way they did me on the records. But I don’t fault them for it, because if you don’t know, you don’t know. It took me to learn.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind.

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

I have a sense of the importance of music and how powerful it is to bring people together.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

When you are studying Jazz best thing to do is listen to records and live music as much you can and absorb everything.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

Applause felt like approval and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

There’s a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style and become sharks on somebody else’s language.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.