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Blues Quotes

Browse 63 quotes about Blues.

Blues Quotes

“I'm a fan first. I believed Duke Ellington when he said there's no bad music, just some of it is presented badly. As a kid, hanging around Church Street, the presentation of music was so powerful, I couldn't help but jump for joy. I had discovered art, or truth, or whatever you want to call it; I had seen a light I'd follow forever.”

MusicBluesBb KingDuke Ellington
Book:Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King
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“To be sure, rock n' roll is usually a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues, but the music in many cases depends on materials that are so alien to the general middle-class, middle-brow American culture as to remain interesting. Many of the same kinds of cheap American dilutions that had disfigured popular swing have tended to disfigure the new music, but the source, the exciting and "vulgar" urban blues of the forties, is still sufficiently removed from the mainstream to be vital. For this reason, rock n' roll has not become as emotionally meaningless as commercial swing. It is sill raw enough to stand the dilution and in some cases, to even be made attractive by the very fact of its commercialization. Even its "alienation" remains conspicuous; it is often used to characterize white adolescents as "youthful offenders." (Rock n' roll also is popular with another "underprivileged" minority, e.g., Puerto Rican youths. There are now even quite popular rock n' roll songs, at least around New York, that have some of the lyrics in Spanish.) Rock n' roll is the blues form of the classes of Americans who lack the "sophistication" to be middle brows, or are too naïve to get in on the mainstream American taste; those who think that somehow Melachrino, Kostelanetz, etc., are too lifeless”

Rock N RollBlues
Book:Blues People: Negro Music in White America
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“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.”

OppressionWorld HistoryBluesBlack Americans
Book:Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
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“No les interesa la pintura. Catherine Guinness [véase Introducción] no se puso pesada hasta el último día, cuando empezó con esa cosa tan fastidiosa que hacen los ingleses de preguntar y preguntar: «¿Qué es exactamente el pop art?». Era como cuando entrevistamos a ese chico del blues, Albert King, para Interview, y ella le preguntó: «¿Qué es exactamente el soul?».”

SoulInterviewPop ArtBluesPintura
Book:The Andy Warhol Diaries
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“After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue. She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L'Heure Bleue. For me they signify love.”

SeaOceanBluePerfumeChampagneBluesPerfect MomentsPicnicL Heure BleueMiles DavisCuracaoTybee Island
Book:The Society of S
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“Humans get hungry for blue, it seems: to hold the sea in their hands, to wear the sky in their hair, to drape themselves in the hazy blue of distant mountains. Blue is more than a colour: it is a feeling. We don’t say that we feel orange or purple, but we say we feel blue when our souls are sad and heavy. We play or sing or listen to the blues to express this sensation. Like any colour, it cannot be adequately described with words, only experienced, known through the eyes and the soul. Making blue has always been magic: the domain of alchemists since the beginning of human history. To find red only required blood or berries or the smearing of red clay. To make brown was as simple as reaching down to the earth beneath one’s feet. White chalk is plentiful in many places, or can be replaced by fire ash. But blue appears rarely in forms from which paints or dyes can be made…blue requires earthly magic.”

MagicColorBlueColourBluesColor BlueAlchemy QuotesColour Blue
Book:She of the Sea
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