B. B. King

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

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.

I have a nice car, a Mercedes. And then I have an old El Camino truck that I’m crazy about. I like to get in that truck and go up in the hills near where I live, in Vegas, and take my camera. That, to me, is Heaven, being out in nature, taking pictures of the wildlife.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

When you just get mixed up and there’s too much going on, then it’s time to pick up your guitar.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything of depth.

People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

Musicians need to continue higher learning try to expand the pallet.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.