B. B King Quotes B. B King It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. Always Everybody Harder Nights People Play Scales Trying Work You
When I was in the country and I was trying to play, nobody seemed to pay too much attention to me. People used to say, 'That's just that ole blues singer.' B. B King
Once in a while, the thumb that fits over the neck of the guitar kinda bothers me a little bit, but not that much yet. I figure in time I won't do much because of my age. B. B King
As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke. B. B King
If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you're going to the bank to borrow money. B. B King
Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good. B. B King
I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, and I was trying to open a bone. Can you imagine that? A bone! I was trying to get the marrow out of a bone, and I took the ax, and I went to chop it, and something slipped, and the ax went right down there and damn near cut it off. B. B King
Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I'm trying to do more. When I'm singing, I don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling. B. B King
If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I'd never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar. B. B King
Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public's going to like, anyway. B. B King
I don't care for the music when they're talking bad about women because I think women are God's greatest gift to the planet – I just like music. B. B King
It was fear. He didn't want to see a united Germany. Stalin made it clear to me – I spoke with him many times – that they couldn't afford to let Germany build up again. They'd been invaded twice, and he wasn't willing to have it happen again. W. Averell Harriman
Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce. W. Averell Harriman