If I had a million dollars, I just wouldn't just completely set back. I'd have to get out there and show my face to all these good people who like me, I have to get out there and show my face. The only thing that would set me back if I get sick or something or pass away, that's all you can do about that you know. But as long as I got my health goin' pretty good, I'll show up around here.
I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.
I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.
My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right
Memphis was almost like going to California. Beale Street was the black man's street.
Man, you don't know how I felt that afternoon when I heard that VOICE and it was my own VOICE.
If you got something you don't want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.
I went to school, but they didn't give you too much schooling because just as soon as you was big enough, you get to working in the fields. I guess I was a big boy for my age.
I went down to my baby's house and I sit down on her steps. She said, now come on in now, you know, my husband just left.
I was so wild and crazy and dumb in my car. It didn't run but 30 miles an hour. You made do.
I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?
I stone got crazy when I saw somebody run down them strings with a bottleneck. My eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and I said that I had to learn.
I rambled all the time. I was just like that, like a rollin' stone.
I got your strand of hair, I kiss it day and night.
I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.
I got that first record out, it came out in '47... Then my name began to ring around. I began to take over. From that point, I tell you, Chicago was in my hand, all the more time that those guys had to listen to me.
I been in the blues all my life. I'm still delivering 'cause I got a long memory.
He took my music, but he gave me my name.
Going to Chicago was like going out of the world.
Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.
China is to stock fraud as Silicon Valley is to technology.
At night in the country, you'd be surprised how that music carries. You could hear my guitar way before you get to the house, and you could hear the peoples hollerin' and screamin'.
All the kids made their own git-tars. Made mine out of a box and bit of stick for a neck. Couldn't do much with it, but that's how you learn.
Ain't nobody's business, if I bark like a dog.
I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.
