B. B. King

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

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.

I didn’t want to disrespect my parents, so I never played blues around the house. But I knew then, same as I know today, that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I think that before they died, they both felt very proud of me.

I was shocked more than most white people to find we had a black President!

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.

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

To work is to feel alive.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

The blues comes right back to a person’s feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don’t know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

Jazz music is the real deal.

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

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

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

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

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.

Music is what feelings sound like.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.