B. B. King

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

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.

Ignorance is bliss? That’s bull, far as I’m concerned. Because I was making a half a cent a side – one penny for a record. It’s like building buses, for example. If you built this bus for me and I didn’t know anything about it, you could charge me whatever I’d pay for it. Now, which one of us is crazy? Me. And that’s the way they did me on the records. But I don’t fault them for it, because if you don’t know, you don’t know. It took me to learn.

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

[moving to Las Vegas] It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

I don’t like to hear someone put down Dixieland. Those people who say there’s no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don’t know.

After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

Musically, I love to talk just off the top of my head and that’s what Jazz is all about.

To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical and spiritual need for me.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.