B. B. King

I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother’s aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

I’ve put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.

A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

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

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

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.

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Talent is only the starting point.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.