Lucky Thompson

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.

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

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of Jazz.

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.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.

There’s so much music out there and so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

People couldn’t give an F about how many cars you got any more. It’s about the way the music sounds, where you’re going, the experience you’re going to hanging out with your friends, the type clothes that you’re wearing – all of that’s art.

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.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.