Joe Williams

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

The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.

It’s all music.

I wanted to do the music, but not at the expense of being happy.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

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.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.

I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

Jazz music is collective creativity.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.