B. B. King

I’ve known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family liked everyone else but them. That hurts, and that’s as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I’ve known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began – out of feeling misused, mistreated. Feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don’t necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did, because there are people having problems all over the world.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

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.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.

I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.

Wes Montgomery played impossible things on the guitar because it was never pointed out to him that they were impossible.

It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur Jazz musician from the professional.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Jazz is a feeling more than anything else.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

If you can’t play the blues, you might as well hang it up.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Jazz stands for freedom.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.