Eliane Elias

If you can’t play the blues, you might as well hang it up.

I heard someone say ‘What’s that kid doing here? Call your piano player and let’s get started.’

The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

There’s so many ways you can hit one note.

I have no one style.

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you’ve got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s just that when you’re playing, Stephane, you’ve got both Chaput and me backing you, but when I’m soloing I’ve only got one guitar behind me!

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.