The Blues Quotes

“And then there was Ray Charles.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Sometimes I think that you’re too sweet to die, Sometimes I think that you’re too sweet to die, And another time I think you ought to be buried alive.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“In a less race-conscious world, black fiddlers and white blues singers might have been regarded as forming a single southern continuum, and such collaborations might have been the norm rather than being hailed as genre-crossing anomalies. Indeed, it is arguably due to the legacy of segregation that blues has presented the most common interracial meeting ground, since, given a level playing field, many of the African American southerners we think of as blues artists might have made their mark performing hillbilly or country and western material.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“To me, the best that music can be is a medium up-tempo twelve-bar blues in F.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“jukeboxes—industry estimates suggest that up to half of all the records sold in the United States in the later 1930s went into commercial music machines—and the early electric speakers were particularly suited to the percussive power of a piano.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“His most influential song, “Matchbox Blues,” popularized an image that had first appeared in one of Rainey’s lyrics and would be recycled by everyone from Billie Holiday to Sam Cooke, Carl Perkins, and the Beatles: “I’m sitting here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes / I ain’t got so many matches, but I’ve got so far to go.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“A specifically rural-sounding blues style did not reach a mass audience until 1926, with the first recordings of a blind Texas street singer named Lemon Jefferson.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Mainstream pop favored romantic dreams, but blues dealt with the sorrows and joys of real relationships: cheating, abandonment, and abuse were balanced by exuberant physical pleasure.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Bessie Smith released her first record for Columbia in May 1923, and it had almost as profound an effect as “Crazy Blues.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“It was records, though, that made blues a dominant force in the African American entertainment business and the model for later pop trends from R&B to hip-hop.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“the shift from banjo to guitar played a significant role in the rise of blues: Banjos have very fast sound decay, which means that one has to play relatively quickly and cannot mimic the drawn-out contours of a vocal performance. The guitar has greater sustain, making it more appropriate for slow songs, and also has a warmer tone, making it more suitable for accompanying sentimental ballads or moaning hollers.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“virtually all southern rural music shows signs of Afro-European interchange.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“So, depending on the situation, one can define blues in emotional, musical, cultural, or commercial terms, and these definitions overlap at times and diverge at others.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Another common way to define blues is as a tradition that employs a range of tonal and rhythmic practices originating in West Africa.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“There is also a purely musical definition of blues: a progression of chords consisting of four bars of the tonic (I), two bars of the subdominant (IV), two bars of the tonic (I), a bar of the dominant seventh (V7), a bar of the subdominant (IV), and two final bars of the tonic (I).”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“However hallowed by history, though, the idea that blues is fundamentally a musical heart-cry has some problems. For one thing, along with some of the most moving, cathartic music on earth, the American blues tradition has produced thousands of comical party songs and upbeat dance music.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Ida Cox, sang that the blues was nothing but “your lover on your mind” and “a slow aching heart disease.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction

“Twenty-five years later, an African American guitarist named Son House sang, “The blues ain’t nothing but a low-down, aching chill.”
― Elijah Wald, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction