B. B. King

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

Once in a while, the thumb that fits over the neck of the guitar kinda bothers me a little bit, but not that much yet. I figure in time I won’t do much because of my age.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

Nobody loves me but my mother – And she could be jivin’, too.

I learned another thing from the hurt my cousin gave me – never to give that kind of hurt to anyone else. My revenge was to change a bad feeling into a good one. If I’m working with you and I sense you’re feeling a little insecure, I try to make you feel great. That’s how I get rid of my old hurt. If I don’t do that, my hurt grows and makes me mean and vengeful. But if hurt can change to kindness – that’s something Mama showed me – the world becomes a little less cruel.

With the birth of the first artist, came the inevitable afterbirth… the first critic

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

There’s always room for improvisation or changes of expression.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

You blows who you is.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.

You don’t chose your inspirations, they chose you.

I felt like I was making a record under the radar, and that is my favorite way to do anything.

It’s not what they think, it’s about what’s best for the music.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.