When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man.
A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.
I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do.
When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.
I was starting to become impotent through this diet and couldn't perform. How many people who are taking the little blue pill, if they started to change what they are eating most of the time, could change the way their sex life is?
The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.
My family were really hard-working, blue-collar people, and I didn't know the idea or concept of working and having fun. I thought you just worked and made money to support your family.
When I was five or six, I asked to sing at a big family party, and ever since I got up there in front of everyone in my suit - it had a blue collar, like in 'Scarface' - I had the bug.
After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater...
The Obama administration believes in experts and blue-ribbon panels. They believe in creating new agencies and boards. They believe in all that, but they just don't trust the entrepreneur's ability to grow her own business and to create jobs.
I believe it is conceded that, notwithstanding the fabled blue laws of New England, a man may, without impropriety, kiss his wife on Sunday and possibly, if he have a chance, some other sweet-faced woman.
I don't know if it's cool to say this anymore, but I grew up listening to Gary Glitter. A majority of his songs were in that shuffle-blues beat, and I think that's probably why I tend to write like that.
Somehow, having an office that I had to go to made me want to work from home, which is easier to do if you don't have a boss waiting for you at the office, even a very blue office.
At home in Victoria, we have three dogs, Tosh and Lucy, they're half Blue Heelers, and then there's Torrin a little Maltese terrier. She gets more attention in the house than anyone else! Yes, I miss them a lot.
I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.
I love Yamaha Clavinovas. I have them at home, in the studio and on tour with me. I find them ideal for all sorts of things: silent practice with headphones at home; writing; arranging and... just playing the blues!
Once Michigan stood proud. In addition to GM, Ford and Chrysler, it was home base for the United Auto Workers, a powerful escalator transporting hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers into America's middle class.
I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being.
I base my roots and history in old blues, old country and old bluegrass, and I like rock 'n' roll, and somehow it all came together, and that is what I am playing now.
With only 2 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, we in the United States can pump until we are blue in the face and it will not change the fact that we need more diverse and more secure sources of energy.
I did grow up poor. My mom managed to get a job as a custodian at our church, and it was really just a favor for her, and my dad's an electrician - just a blue-collar family, and the house was usually falling apart.
