B. B. King Quotes

The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people. It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.

Hip-hop isn't dead by any means, but it's not something I define my black identity with.

The blues - there's no black and white - it's the truth.

If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.

Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!

The blues is life itself.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.

A lot of the things I do deal with my race, but my race is who I am. I'm an American kid who grew up listening to predominantly hip-hop. I will talk about hip-hop as the music I grew up listening to, and I think sometimes people like to put it as, 'Oh, well, he's talking about black things.' And, yeah, they are, but that's my American identity.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.

The blues is the roots, the rest is the fruits.

Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.

All blues singers are great liars.

I feel like the blues is actually some kind of documentary of the past and the present - and something to give people inspiration for the future.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.