B. B. King

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.

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 bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

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

I worked until I could play and do changes at any tempo in any key and said ‘What else is there?’ Now I’m finding out.

I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

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

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at Jazz.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.

[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.