Blues Singers

"Ah but you got away, didn't you babe You just turned your back on the crowd You got away, I never once heard you say I need you, I don't need you I need you, I don't need you And all of that jiving around."

"Ah, but you got away, didn't you baby You just threw it all to the ground You got away, they can’t pay you now For making your sweet little sound, can they? Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox Making your sweet little sound on the radio Making your sweet little sound."

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel You were talking so brave and so sweet Giving me head on an unmade bed While the limousines wait in the street. And those were the reasons and that was New York. I was running for the money and the flesh. I was running for the money and the flesh That was called love, for the workers in song And it still is for those of us left."

"Work me Lord, work me Lord. Please don't you leave me, I feel so useless down here With no one to love Though I've looked everywhere And I can't find me anybody to love, To feel my care."

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free... And feeling good was easy, lord, when he sang the blues. You know feeling good was good enough for me, Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee."

"You know you got it if it makes you feel good."

"Well, I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough. I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it, Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!"

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"

"Oh yeah, make up your mind, honey, You're playing with me, hey hey hey, Make up your mind, darling, You're playing with me, come on now! Now either be my loving man, I said-a let me honey, let me be, yeah!"

"Please don'tcha do it to me babe, no! Please don'tcha do it to me baby, Either take this love I offer Or honey let me be."

"You know that I need a man, honey Lord, You know that I need a man, But when I ask you to you just tell me That maybe you can."

"You say that it's over baby, Lord, You say that it's over now, But still you hang around me, come on, Won't you move over."

"An’ I don’t want much outa life, I never wanted a mansion in the south. I just-a want to find someone sincere Who’d treat me like he talks, One good man."

"One good man, Oh ain’t much, honey ain’t much, It’s only everything..."

"Honey, I love to go to parties, And I like to have a good time, But if it gets too pale after a while Honey and I start looking to find One good man."

"Oh! But it don't make no difference, babe, hey, And I know that I could always try. Theres a fire inside everyone of us, You'd better need it now, I got to hold it, yeah, I better use it till the day I die."

"Don't expect any answers, dear, For I know that they don't come with age, no, no. Well, ain't never gonna love you any better, babe. And I'm never gonna love you right, So you'd better take it now, and right now."

"Dawn has come at last, Twenty-five years, honey just in one night, oh yeah. Well, Im twenty-five years older now So I know we can't be right And Im no better, baby, And I cant help you no more Than I did when just a girl."

"Aww, but it don't make no difference, baby, no, no, And I know that I could always try. It don't make no difference, baby, yeah, I better hold it now, I better need it, yeah, Im gonna use it till the day I die, whoa."

"Music’s for grooving man, and music’s not for puttin’ yourself through bad changes, y’know? I mean, you don’t have to go take anybody’s shit, man, just to like music, y’know what I mean? You don’t. So... so if you’re getting’ more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it man. Y’know, it’s just music. Music’s... music's s’posed to be different than that."

"To sing blues, you've got to be able to, ... be willing to, feel things."

"Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week. In MY week."

"Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man."

"Time keeps movin' on, Friends they turn away. I keep movin' on But I never found out why I keep pushing so hard the dream, I keep tryin to make it right Through another lonely day, whoaa."

"You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things."

""Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" is as good an epitaph for the counterculture as any; we'll never know how-or if-Janis meant to go on from there. Janis Joplin's death, like that of a fighter in the ring, was not exactly an accident. Yet it's too easy to label it either suicide or murder, though it involved elements of both. Call it rather an inherent risk of the game she was playing, a game whose often frivolous rules both hid and revealed a deadly serious struggle. The form that struggle took was incomplete, shortsighted, egotistical, self-destructive. But survivors who give in to the temptation to feel superior to all that are in the end no better than those who romanticize it. Janis was not so much a victim as a casualty. The difference matters."

"Here's a wish for a runaway girl; Here's a prayer for honky-tonk Pearl — Hope she finds someplace outta this world Where she feels at home."

"A banker's daughter or a runaway girl, A little lady or a honky-tonk Pearl Has to find someplace in this world Where she feels at home. A banker's daughter is so hard to deceive A little lady is so hard to please Honky-tonk Pearl wears her heart on her sleeve, And her heart will not grow cold."

"Janis knew more than I did about "how it was", but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand. On the various occasions when we were together, she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want to hear, like older people do when they hear kids they love saying with absolute youthful confidence, "Oh, that'll never happen to me." Sometimes you know you can't tell them how it is, they have to find out for themselves. Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grandmother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom. Did we compliment each other? Yes, but not often enough."

"Singer Janis Joplin, who in 1968 was screeching out her voice with a California group called , said that she was not a hippie, because hippies believed in trying to make the world better. Instead she said she was a : "Beatniks believe things aren't going to get better and say, 'The hell with it,' stay stoned, and have a good time.""

"At times, we [the White Stripes] almost ignore our own music. If we have the stage, we've gotta play Son House's music, because there's nobody to keep it alive. We don't wanna be known as the band that's conducting music instruction class. But that's all everyone talks about - why MTV's not good, why radio's not good. And the answer is really because whatever you want to call it - blues, country, folk - isn't around any more. That's why everyone's so mad, and I'm tired of it being my job to bring it back."

"I wasn’t prepared. He had a big Mercedes, with a custom sound system, and he drove like hell through Nashville traffic, with Slim Harpo at defcon 1 volume."

"I would love to be Jack White — or maybe I want the peo­ple who like Jack White to also like me. But I”m the guy who writes beau­ti­ful music at 85 beat per minute."

"Jack is the showman—the brassy frontman and the snake-oil trader."

"I see him becoming one of the greatest record producers there is."

"I'm not saying I came up with anything [laughs]. It's like people thinking we would be more real if we went onstage in jeans and T-shirts. How ignorant is that, to think that because they don't wear a suit onstage that someone is giving you the real deal? People do come and see us and think, "Look at all these gimmicks." Go ahead, man. Go ahead and think that."

"I saw a review of our new album, and it said, "Every single component of the White Stripes is a gigantic lie." What does that mean? Have I sat down and said I was born in Mississippi? No. Did I say I grew up on a plantation and learned how to play guitar from a blind man? I never said anything like that. It's funny that people think me and Meg sit up late at night, in front of a gas lamp, and come up with these intricate lies to trick people."

"It'll sometimes hit me in the middle of a song, like, who do I think I am standing up here...playing."

"I tend to be that guy, you know? When me and four friends walk into a restaurant and nobody else talks to the host, I say, “Yeah, it’s a table for five.” I don’t want to be that guy; I wish someone else would say something. But it always ends up being me, and I hate what comes with that. There’s a lot of baggage—ego and narcissism—that comes with leadership. It’s difficult to cope with at times."

"Well that's a polite thing to say but that's fucking ridiculous."

"You can't do better than that."

"Is this some kind of fucking radio promotion? What the fuck is this? Let me just say that if whatever said radio station tries to blacklist us for my comments about their balloons, I would like them to know I want a written apology tomorrow for interrupting my song."

"'I'm excited by the band [White Stripes]. It really excites me. But it wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped. Once that goes away, then I'll know that it's not worth doing it any more.'"

"Every time there's a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days. Hardly any of them took a year, I'll tell you. In this day and age, I think it's important that people know that."

"I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan."

"I love him (Josh Homme) too much, and you can't hurt someone that you love that much ... unless you're family."

"I feel it, you felt it—we're all struggling with the trouble that this industry is in right now. And it's not about sales; it's about beauty and romance and a relationship to art that's turning invisible, and it's affecting people's perception of music. It's affecting whether they think of it as a viable art, because it's so fucking disposable. It's not about being modern or retro or a Luddite or being hopeful or pessimistic about the future; it's about clinging on to what makes sense of our lives, and what give our lives value, and what gives us a commonality and a feeling of belonging."

"Frank Sinatra was dignified. We don't have a Frank Sinatra, or a Patti Page nowadays. What do we have? Ashlee Simpson instead of Patti Page! I mean, look at those people - like Paris Hilton! Who are all these skanks, man? Little girls are looking up to these girls, and it's so gross. Those girls have no dignity at all, and parents are letting their kids dress up like those skanks. But what else have they got? What are the other choices? Somebody had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to play guitar on Lindsay Lohan's album! She's another one of those 16-year-old actresses, and she's making an album! Like, 'NO!' Ha ha ha!"

"I'm always surprised when anything about the band connects. But I love the fact that it's hard for people to understand. We've said before that it's always been a great thing to get certain people to go away thinking, 'Oh dear, she can't play the drums!' 'Fine, if you think it's all a gimmick, go away!' It weeds out people who wouldn't care anyway."

"It seemed like there was no control over it. I think certain things just popped. God was blessing us in telling us that certain things were going the way they were supposed to go."