B. B. King

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

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’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

The crowds treat me like my last name. When I go onstage people usually stand up, I never ask them to, but they do. They stand up and they don’t know how much I appreciate it.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That’s all I know.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

It is great to have your own label; you can cultivate your own artists… I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

Jazz goes into my coffee in the morning, in my wine at night.

I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage.

It’s not technique — it’s what you have to say.