Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

There's an age-old maxim in the Black community: You've got to be twice as good to get half as far.

To sing blues, you've got to be able to, ... be willing to, feel things.

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.

Someone once said that blues and gospel were fraternal twins, close in spirit, neither one wanting to admit how similar they looked.

I sing the blues and swallow them too.

I could see the blues was about survival.

We sometimes play the blues, too, but we don’t talk about which blues club or which blues tradition we’re “affiliated with.” Who knows? Maybe if there were fewer academic workers caught up in the mechanisms of disciplinary and institutional snobbery, we could start thinking about what it means to be a member of a musicians’ union or a players’ union. And then maybe, when we got the workplace blues, we could get together and work it on out.

The Blues is an acoustic tear.

One of the reasons I didn't ever pursue a career - in the music world if you're black or mixed, you need to be able to belt a song or else you're not a singer, you know?

I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.

I didn't enter into this to get any kind of affirmation or confirmation. I entered into this to see what I could do for other people — to give them my sincerity, to give them my love and my care, to take a load off, to have a smile, to have a memory or two. Singing the blues has always been about alleviating the blues, and that's apparent when you listen to them. Sure is nice to hear that someone else is, or has been where you are, or have been. Because we forget sometimes, that we're all in this together, and we have many, many similar experiences — all the time, all across the world, in every age.