QUOTATION: It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.
ATTRIBUTION: James Weldon Johnson (1871?1938), U.S. author, poet. Black Manhattan, ch. 11 (1930).
QUOTATION: You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
ATTRIBUTION: Billie Holiday (1915?1959), U.S. blues singer, and William Dufty. Lady Sings the Blues, ch. 11 (1956, rev. 1975).
QUOTATION: Downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I?ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
ATTRIBUTION: Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926), U.S. poet. Kaddish, sct. 1, Kaddish and Other Poems (1960).
QUOTATION: Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread?without it, it?s flat.
ATTRIBUTION: Carmen McRae (b. 1922), U.S. jazz singer. Speech, July 2, 1980, Newport Jazz Festival, New York City. ?Blues Is a Woman.?
QUOTATION: 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.
ATTRIBUTION: B.B. King (b. 1925), U.S. blues guitarist. quoted in Sunday Times (London, Nov. 4, 1984).
