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.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

Jazz music is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.

The guitar and the dog, in order not to be separated from man, have submitted themselves with resignation to the worst alterations of size and appearance.

Les Paul was one of the great innovators of the early electric guitar, and he made some fantastic guitar records. To me, Les Paul is very much it.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

Music and life are all about style.

You have to sound sad first, then maybe later you can sound good.

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

Stop before you’re done.

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

I got out of the car and there was a knife in my neck. The guy says, “Don’t move.” And the drummer got out of the car, and he got a gun in his head. This was my entrance to the South Side of Chicago. But it was necessary, because I wanted to play jazz.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

The blues comes right back to a person’s feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don’t know nothing about the blues, please believe me.