B. B. King

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I’d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

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!

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.

I’m always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.

You only go around once and this ain’t no rehearsal.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult. I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.

I’m going to make music out of whatever style it is, being true to the artform itself.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

People complain about the music industry, but this is a great time to be a musician.

I try to practice with my life.

I wanna hear myself everywhere

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet, put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’