B. B. King

I was born on a plantation, and things weren’t so good. We didn’t have any money. I never thought of the word ‘poor’ ’til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you’re not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go onstage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience, and I like to feel in most cases like I’m a big guy with long rubber arms that I can reach around my audience and swing and sway with them – move them with me. And many nights, I can’t. Many nights I can. But you do like a good manager with a baseball team. You keep pulling pitchers, you keep trying.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

The Blues? It’s the mother of American music. That’s what is is – the source.

As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

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.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.

There is no truer truth obtainable by man than comes of music.

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.