B. B. King

I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other… I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.

My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess – she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn’t be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.

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

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

Touring a segregated America – forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most ‘cos you don’t realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

I have no elitist concepts about Jazz. I would not be the musician I am today without experiencing invaluable music styles that are at the roots of African American black life and culture.

Last time I saw Count Basie, he was in a wheelchair. They wheeled him up onto the stage, he sits down at the piano, and he gives the downbeat, and that band played like they were in heaven. And right in the middle, the band cuts. He had to take one hand and put the other on it, and he comes down with one note. And it was the greatest note I ever heard in my life.

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

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

I think that what is important is that the music be honest and direct and that it is relevant to today.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.