Topic: Tell It To Me ? Quote Drive 2010

[unezrider]

hello friend,
i figure it's a new year, so we need a new quote thread. 

"hey, baby, you just as full of gas as you can be. because when you get drunk, you come home & blow up on me!" Charley Jordan, "Gasoline Blues"

[dj]

The blues is a bantering conversation on, for the most part, the subjects of sex, love, anxiety, and travel, that was little different from the idle back-and-forth talk that might have been overheard in a 1930s barrelhouse. - Michael Taft, review of Barrelhouse Words by Stephen Calt

The review was posted on the pre-war blues list.  The posting doesn't make clear (at least to me) where the review was taken from, but implies that it's taken from some printed/online source.  I hope nobody minds my quoting it here.  I thought it was too good to pass up.

[uncle bud]

How can he start to sing a song without knowing what he was going to do in advance? - Bill Monroe mystified by Roscoe Holcomb's modus operandi, notes to Mountain Music of Kentucky

[banjochris]

If I had one biscuit, and you hadn't eaten nothin' in a month, I'd break it in two and eat both pieces.
Yank Rachell to Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie

[unezrider]

"feel so bad, feel like a ballgame on a rainy day." Chuck Willis, I Feel So Bad

it's such a beautiful line

[uncle bud]

Having a phonograph without these records is like having pork chops without gravy - Yes indeed. - Columbia advertisement for Bessie Smith's Hateful Blues/Frankie Blues

[Stuart]

Not strictly Blues related and somewhat off color, but I thought that I'd share it. It comes via Blind Brand X (Ragtime Ralph):

"This ol' world is just too straightfaced for me...we need to laugh more...or as a friend of mine said recently... 'I'm so straight, the stick up my ass has a stick up it's ass!'..."

[dj]

East St. Louisan Peetie Wheatstraw had already been to the crossroads, made a deal with the Devil, married Satan's daughter, and become the high sheriff of Hell many years before Robert Johnson recorded anything - Kevin Belford, Devil At The Confluence, talking about how St. Louis gets no respect as a blues town.

[uncle bud]

Here she comes! The "Black Diamond Express to Hell" with Sin, the Engineer, holding the throttle wide open; Pleasure is the Headlight, and the Devil is the Conductor. You can feel the roaring of the Express and the moanin' of the Drunkards, Liars, Gamblers and other folk who have got aboard. They are hell-bound and they don't want to go. The train makes eleven stops but nobody can get off... - Vocalion advertisement for Rev. A.W. Nix's 1927 recording Black Diamond Express to Hell

[uncle bud]

*  *  *  Updated *  *  *

Quote Oracle has been updated. Keep 'em coming, folks.

[uncle bud]

The blues'll kill you. And make you live, too. - Shirley Griffith, from Art Rosenbaum's notes to Saturday Blues

Thanks to Jeff Harris's blog for this. Read more about Shirley Griffith and the recordings of him, and others including Scrapper Blackwell, made by Art Rosenbaum at the website: http://sundayblues.org/archives/1337.

Edited to add: There is also a 1-hour interview with Art Rosenbaum at that link which I am looking forward to listening to.

[unezrider]

Now the soles of my shoes is thin, & i'll soon be on my feet again.

&

People is raving 'bout hard times, i don't know why they should. If some people was like me, they didn't have no money when times was good. Lonnie Johnson ? Hard Times Ain't Gone No Where

[uncle bud]

Put lye salt in my gravy, potash in my tea. I know by that she's tryin' to poison me. - Brownie McGhee, Dealing With the Devil

There's one thing about this woman that I don't understand. Always go to bed with a icepick in her hand. - Brownie McGhee, Dealing With the Devil

[uncle bud]

The preacher must get some sometime, just like any other man. - Bob Robinson, The Preacher Must Get Some Sometime

[Johnm]

Hi all,
"Oh, baby, I'm behind the eight ball now.  A dollar bill is my friend, ain't no human friends nohow."
Bill Gaither--"I'm Behind the Eight Ball Now"
All best,
Johnm