You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from. ~ Van Morrison
"Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about jazz and blues."~ John Mayall
"The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species."~ Alan Lomax
"I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed."~ B. B. King
"With my little band, I did everything they did with a big band. I made the blues jump. " ~ Louis Jordan
The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.John Lee Hooker
I really love this line from a BB King CD that I own, it seems to be him making a sound check or something, but it hits the blues right on the head;
Nobody loves me but my mother,
and she could be jiving too....
I got a black cat bone
I got a mojo too
I got a John Coquorer
I'm going to mess with you
I'm going to make you girls
lead me by my hand
Then the world will know that
I'm a Hoochie Coochie Man
Sam Phillips once remarked of Chester Arthur Burnett, "When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.'
Today is the birthday of John Adam Estes more commonly known as Sleepy John Estes. He was born on 25th January in 1899, and passed away on 5th June 1977.
Now look here mama you ask me to be your kid,~ Sleepy John Estes
She said you can, only if you keep it hid,
Please don't let my husband or main man catch you here.
I woke up with the blues three different ways
One say go and other two say stay
"...Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues, in the middle of the pouring rain. W.C. Handy, won't you look down over me?"- Marc Cohn's 1991 song Walking in Memphis
Lot of people talking about young girls being pregnant as of late. I think that poet, philosopher and master bluesman, Muddy Waters said it best;
"Young girls make strong babies."
I'm TELLING YOU, MAN, the wold is a place."
"Say, the world is a place, huh."Chapter thirteen, Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama
"That's just what I'm saying."
We were walking back to the car after dinner in Hyde Park, and Johnnie was in an expansive mood. He often got like this, expecially after a good meal and wine. The first time I met him, when he was still working with a downtown civic group, he had started explaining the relationship between jazz and Eastern religion, then swerved into an analysis of black women's behinds, before coming to a stop on the subject of federal Reserve Bank policy. In such moments his eyes would grow wide; his voice would speed up; his round, bearded face would glow with a childlike wonder. That was part of the reason I'd hired Johnnie, I suppose, that curiosity of his, his appreciation of the absurd. He was a philosopher of the blues.
Lot of people talking about young girls being pregnant as of late. I think that poet, philosopher and master bluesman, Muddy Waters said it best;
"Young girls make strong babies."
The genre of the blues was a hallmark of American society and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.So great was its influence, and so much was it recognized as Handy's hallmark, that author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his novel The Great Gatsby that;
"All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor."
