B. B. King

A lot of people believe what other people say.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

I believe all people are good. Some just do bad things. I had a teacher – God bless him, he died a few years ago -Luther H. Henson. I was a student of his at the time I lost my mother. He was my one person that seemed like anything I wanted to know, I could ask him and he’d give me an answer that was right. He told me, ‘There’ll come a time when people won’t judge you by your color; they’ll judge you by your deeds; how you act and how you treat people.’ Hearing professor Henson say that made me think, and I guess sort of toe the line a little bit more. And later on I heard Dr. King say, ‘I have a dream, where you’ll be judged not by the colour of the skin…’ Of course, I’d been a man for years when Dr. King came along, but it hit me hard because it strengthened for me what prof Henson had already said when I was a boy.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

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.

You’re just as beautiful as you feel.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

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.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.

[In 1969] I think lyrics have always been important to any serious writer of music.

The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.

Eliminating the piano means that I’ve always worked closer with the bass than most players.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.