T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.”
“The blues are real important. It's where most of the hard rock n' roll came from.”
“The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits”
Source: I am the blues: the Willie Dixon story
“The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.”
“The blues are three L's - living , loving and hopefully, laughing.”
“The blues are what I've turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life.”
“The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.”
“The blues brings you back into the fold. The blues isn't about the blues, it's about we have all had the blues and we are all in this together.”
“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.”
“The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.”
Source: Born to Run
“The blues echoes right through into soul, R&B and hip hop. It's part of the make-up of modern music. You can't turn your back on the blues.”
“The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.”
“The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.”
“The blues have always had some of the best times, best feelings I’ve ever had.”
“The blues have hope wrapped inside them.”
“The blues he sends to meet me, won't defeat me. It won't be long til happiness steps up to greet me.”
“The blues is a hopeful music. It helps you process something rather than avoid it. It's like mourning, in essence.”
“The blues is a low down achin' chill.”
“The blues is a mighty long road. Or it could be a river, one that twists and turns and flows into a sea of limitless musical potential.”
“The blues is also existential and offers a sense of mature reflection that enabled it to be the leitmotif of modern life.”
“The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.”
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.”
Source: Shadow and Act
“The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.”
Source: The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
Source: The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison: Revised and Updated
“The blues is celebration, because when you take sorrow and turn it into music, you transform it.”
“The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.”
“The blues is life itself.”
“The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.”
“The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other: all night long. It's not too cold in that bed, and it ain't too hot. But what's the matter? The blues has got you.”
“The blues is not a plaything like some people think they are.”
“The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.”
Source: Conversations with Albert Murray
“The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.”
Source: Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
“The blues is something separate from what I do. They connect at certain spots, but blues is different. I wouldn't put it in with what my career has been. That would be a whole separate wing.”
“The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. Its cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. Its not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.”
“The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.”
“The blues is the roots, the rest is the fruits.”
“The blues records of each decade explain something about the philosophical basis of our lives as black people. ... Blues is a basis of historical continuity for black people. It is a ritualized way of talking about ourselves and passing it on.”
“The blues scale was the first thing I learned. It's just a pentatonic scale with a flat seventh and a few notes that sound cool when you bend them. And because people have amalgamated the blues into this rock-blues scale, if you're using it, you better sound like a real authentic blues player.”
“The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed”
“The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.”
“The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.”
“The Blues
The Blahs
The Weary Dismals
Lost in Gloom
Woesome Me's
The Eternal 3 AM of the Soul.”
Source: When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put
“The blues to me is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy ... it's sort of a mixed up thing. You just have to feel it.”
“The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.”
“The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.”
“The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.”
“The blues will always be because the blues are the roots of all American music.”
Source: I am the blues: the Willie Dixon story
“The blues will be blue, and the jealousies green, but when love picks its color it demands to be seen.”
“The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.”
“The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.”