B. B. King

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

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.

I don’t feel that no big stone should be put over my head, saying he did this, he did that. Unless there’s something that I really did do. I believe I’m just ordinary. And I’d like for people to think of me that way, as just a guy that tried. Wanted to be loved by other people because he loved people.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

I don’t care about the rules, if I don’t break the rules at least 10x every song then I’m not doing my job.

I didn’t need to worry about keys, chords, melody if I had that emotion that brought tears and laughter to people’s hearts.

I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

I have been doing music all my life so everyday when I get up I expect music will be part of it.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.

I’m very shy, and I shy away from people. But the moment I hit the stage, it’s a different feeling I get nerve from somewhere; maybe it’s because it’s something I love to do.

After two takes you’re imitating yourself.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.