I never use that word, retire.
If you can't get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.
I guess you can look at me, and tell I'm the old man. My name is BB King.
There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I haven't yet done.
I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton... oh, there's many more! I wouldn't want to be like them, you understand, but I'd like to be equal, if you will.
The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.
I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an' my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.
Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'cos you don't realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a pe...
I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the M.D. of them all.
When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, 'That's just that ole blues singer.'
I've put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.
I don't try to just be a blues singer - I try to be an entertainer. That has kept me going.
You've heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that's because there's been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. I th...
I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs.
I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.
Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.
I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.
I used to play - when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.
If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I'd never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.
As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.
When you don't have much money, you worry that they'll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won't know where you are.
