Particularly with the blues, it's not just about bad times. It's about the healing spirit.
The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.
Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck made me an Anglophile. I listened to English and Irish artists as a kid, and they were way louder, heavier, and faster than the traditional blues that I was listening to.
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and attitudes, the stance they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.
There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.
The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.
I was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.
I'll listen to anything authentic whether it's bluegrass or gospel or blues.
Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.
The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.
See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.
I'm not a blues singer, I'm a diva.
Without the blues, modern music would be nothing like it is now - not remotely.
In blues music, there's a lot of borrowing, so it's often difficult to identify the originator of a song.
I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.
Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.
