B. B. King

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

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.

As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.

You only live but once, and when your died your done, so let the good times roll.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

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

Jazz amounts to Blues, your unique sound and the elusive genius of improvisation.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

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

The majority of people mistakenly feel they don’t need a live musical experience.

When you just get mixed up and there’s too much going on, then it’s time to pick up your guitar.

I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress…so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.