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 think I’ve done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven’t yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe I’d reached that peak. But I’m 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, I’ll be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

I remember Elvis as a young man hanging around the Sun Studios. Even then, I knew this kid had a tremendous talent. He was a dynamic young boy. His phraseology, his way of looking at a song, was as unique as Sinatra’s. I was a tremendous fan, and had Elvis lived, there would have been no end to his inventiveness.

Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway. He has to get through you first before he gets into the house to get your family. I’m one of those guys who wants to be in that door.

I believe all people are good. Some just do bad things. I had a teacher – God bless him, he died a few years ago -Luther H. Henson. I was a student of his at the time I lost my mother. He was my one person that seemed like anything I wanted to know, I could ask him and he’d give me an answer that was right. He told me, ‘There’ll come a time when people won’t judge you by your color; they’ll judge you by your deeds; how you act and how you treat people.’ Hearing professor Henson say that made me think, and I guess sort of toe the line a little bit more. And later on I heard Dr. King say, ‘I have a dream, where you’ll be judged not by the colour of the skin…’ Of course, I’d been a man for years when Dr. King came along, but it hit me hard because it strengthened for me what prof Henson had already said when I was a boy.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

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

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

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

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

End phrases where you feel they should end. Don’t look for resolutions you don’t feel because the books call for them.

Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

Especially, I want my work-and the trios if possible-to sing.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.