Topic: Tell It To Me ? Quote Drive 2010

[lindy]

These Memphis cops call me a vagrant, but I?m a musician. I?m a recording artist for the Vict?ry [Victor] company. Known all over the world. But these southern laws don?t recognize a man by his talents.

Willie Blackwell to Alan Lomax

[uncle bud]

"Can you play B.B. King?" "Yeah, if you put some strings on him, I'll play him." - Yank Rachell, Blues Mandolin Man

[DanceGypsy]

"You say a white boy can't know the blues.  During the Depression I'd sleep in ditches and know if I died that night no one would know what I was or where I come from."
--Harmonica Frank Floyd, quoted in Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins' Good Rocking Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock & Roll.

[uncle bud]

Here's "Ninety-Nine Years and One Dark Day." The ninety-nine years is when you got a lifetime, the dark day is when you're dead. That's too bad for you. - Jesse Fuller

[Mr.OMuck]

"The sweet, passionate melody captivated his heart from the first note; it was full of radiance, full of the tender throbbing of inspiration and happiness and beauty, continually growing and melting away; it rumoured of everything on earth that is dear and secret and sacred to mankind; it breathed of immortal sadness and it departed from the earth to die in the heavens."
Ivan Turgenev

[unezrider]

i asked him how 'bout it, & he said, "all right!" i asked him how long, & he said, "all night!"
? Mattie Delaney, 'The Big Road Blues' (1930)

[DanceGypsy]

"You can't play no blues unless you have some hard times.  Young people today, I don'y care whether they're black or white, they didn't come up like Muddy and me, they come up too easy."

Howlin' Wolf to Peter Guralnick, from Feel Like Going Home.

I posted this in my thread What Is It About the Blues, but I felt it belonged here on its own merit as well.

[Rivers]

"I had no idea jug band music was so important" - overheard in the lobby at a Chasin' Gus's Ghost performance

And that was my 2,900th post, excellent.

[uncle bud]

I made my first banjo out of a guitar neck and a tin can mama used to make biscuits in. And the first thing I learnt on that was Old John Booker - You Call That Gone. - Gus Cannon, interview on Broadcasting the Blues, Document Records.

[uncle bud]

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read. - Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

[Parlor Picker]

Don't know if we had it before, but the Jesse Fuller reference above reminds me of his:

"'Scuse my cough, I slept in a chicken house last night!"

[Mr.OMuck]

"Its like somebody making your lip speak, making it say things he thinks....The Blues is a slow story. The feeling of the beautiful things that happen to you is in the Blues; its a home language like two friends talking.
its the language everybody understands. You can inject into people with the instrument i think.

Trumpeter Henry Red Allen on the Blues

[Rambler]

"Ma, well then it looks like I found me some religion"

Brings to mind Broonzy's 'Hey Bub Blues' : I seed a man standin' at the window pullin' off his clothes.... So I said, "Hey, Bub, -- what goes?"
So he said, "Look, Bub, -- if you knowed what I paid for this room and what's in it, them clothes will be out of style when I come down."

[uncle bud]

"Is your name Rabbit or is that just a nickname?" "No, my name is Lewis Anderson Muse. That's my real name." "How'd they give you that name?" "What, Rabbit? Well, I got that name playing baseball." - Interview with Lewis "Rabbit" Muse, Digital Library of Appalachia

[uncle bud]

Upstroke is the way I learned it though. That's the way you're supposed to go with a mandolin. After I got my hands stiff I have to play it down. I can't play that quiver like I used to. You can play that quiver better with an upstroke. Upstroke is a better sound to me. Sure is. - Yank Rachell, Blues Mandolin Man