B. B. King

I never use that word, retire.

I don’t think it’s meant for man to know everything at once.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

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 guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

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.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

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

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Especially, I want my work-and the trios if possible-to sing.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

The extreme dynamic and percussive possibilities of an acoustic guitar amplified through a bridge pickup have, over many years of performing, informed not only the way I play, but the way I write and sing too. My guitar taught me to sing in textures, from the roundest lingering harmonic to the sharpest snap of a pulled string. Being a percussion instrument as well as a melodic instrument, my guitar also teaches me about the relationship between rhythm and melody. Portable. Did I mention it also taught me about being portable?

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

People always ask, “Why jazz?” and I’m like “Why not?” It’s kind of like asking Seurat, “Why so many dots?” I imagine if you asked Bjork, “Why the Tibetan bells?” She’d probably be like “That’s just what I heard.” It’s the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

I am a devout musician.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.