The Blues is an acoustic tear.

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.

I sing the blues and swallow them too.

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.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.

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.

[T]he 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.

All music is the blues. All of it.

Catch a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain. Wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone... The blues are all the same.

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.

Song sung blue, everybody knows one.
Song sung blue, every garden grows one. Me and you are subject to
The blues now and then.
But when you take the blues
And make a song,
You sing 'em out again.

And I guess that's why they call it the blues.
Time on my hands could be time spent with you,
Laughing like children, living like lovers,
Rolling like thunder under the covers.
And I guess that's why they call it the blues.

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.