B. B. King

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

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

T-Bone was, to me, that sound of being in heaven.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

When people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are. I was born and raised in a segregated society, but when I left there, I had nobody I disliked other than the people that’d mistreated me, and that only lasted for as long as they were mistreating me.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

What are you going to do when you love music? You can’t stop.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

I was probably six years old when I first sang before an audience.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

We’re here to have a ball.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

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.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

One shouldn’t be in the habit of quoting oneself.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you’re really interested in it.

Jazz music is the real deal.