B. B. King

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

I don’t try to just be a blues singer – I try to be an entertainer. That has kept me going.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

As you get older, your fingers sometimes swell. But I’ve missed 18 days in 65 years. Sometimes guys will just take off; I’ve never done that. If I’m booked to play, I go and play.

When you don’t have much money, you worry that they’ll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won’t know where you are.

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.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

You’ve got to learn your instrument.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

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.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

Everyone is working who should be.

Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

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.

In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

They told me to play what I felt. Hey, I’m a Jazz musician, that’s what I do.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.