B. B. King

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die to get there!

I tell my children now that they are older, ‘If something happens to me… don’t make no big fuss over me. Don’t make no big expense on my funeral. Don’t put any pressure on the rest of the family. I’ve loved everybody, and I hope they loved me. But don’t create this big expense for the family.’

If you can’t get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.

The main thing is you want to emote.

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.

I write songs about real things… The subject dictates the mood and it goes from there, really.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

Music and life are all about style.

The true value of this music lies in an artist’s individual creativity and that unique process of expression which is Jazz.

Some twenty years ago, during the course of a memorable evening at the Stravinskys’ home in Los Angeles, the venerable maestro turned to me and said in no uncertain terms: ‘My dear, you should conduct your own music. All composers should conduct their own music!

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

There has always been a tension between Jazz as a commercial music and as an art form.

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.