Quotations

Elwood: What makes the perfect blues song?

Bobby "Blue" Bland : Well, it's about life. Some of the things that I sing about actually happened to me. Maybe you have a girlfriend and you lose her. It's not a good feeling, not if you care for her. Blues is based on feeling, what happens in life. I see things on TV, people that don't have anythng to eat, starving. That's the blues. You think of those type of things to change the mood when you are singing. If I have a lyric that has anything pertaining to sadness, I just go back and think of whatever happened or how I felt at certain different times. It helps me to say things better and have more meaning to them. You can't be happy and sing the blues as far as I'm concerned. Maybe some people can, but it's news to me if they do.

 

Elwood: Do you think that makes young people today less interested in the blues?

Bland: Blues is a downer to younger black people, mainly because our history carries a lot of guilty and disappointment. Blues basically was done by being sad, being out in the country and not allowed to do certain things. So young black people, some of them don't want to look back on that era. They want to look ahead the way that Dr. King has brought them up to now. There's no looking bad, we got to go forward. But the blues will always be there.

 

- Elwood's Blues