B. B. King

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.

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 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.

The problem is that a lot of the blues stations are late on Saturday night, and like a lot of people, I ain’t no vampire!

There have been times when I’ve been around people I wouldn’t care to be around, and if I could get away I would. We have a word in Mississippi – we just don’t seem to set horses. In other words, this person is always saying something that gets your goat, y’understand? But when people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are. I was born and raised in a segregated society, but when I left there I had nobody I disliked other than the people that’d mistreated me, and that only lasted for as long as they were mistreating me.

I was shocked more than most white people to find we had a black President!

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

It’s difficult for me to dislike an artist, no matter what he’s creating.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

I don’t need words. It’s all in the phrasing.

I play whatever the hell comes out… that’s it.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

Jazz music is the real deal.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.