Black Music Quotes

“And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today-jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock and roll, hip hop and on and on- is derived from the blues.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it’s Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before dying.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“The taste of the masses isn't for structured music, it's for rhythm. Primitive music, Black music, has had a big influence in determining what's played on the radio, because the radio audience is more primitive in tastes than the concert audiences were.”
― Andrew MacDonald, Hunter

“So don't ask me how to catch Jes Grew. Ask Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, your poets, your painters, your musicians, ask them how to catch it. Ask those people who be shaking their tambourines impervious of the ridicule they receive from Black and White Atonists, Europe the ghost rattling its chains down the deserted halls of their brains.”
― Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo