Music

Music can never be taken away from the black soul. Check out what African-American singers and other noted Blacks say about the magic of music.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong

At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes? I also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not be hampered by notes.
James Weldon Johnson

Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.
Langston Hughes

Commercial rock 'n' roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music an obscene looting of a cultural expression.
Ralph Ellison

Critics don't buy records. They get 'em free.
Nat King Cole

Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz.
Louis Armstrong

I improvised, crazed by the music... Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.
Josephine Baker

I intend to put them on the charts.
MC Hammer

I love music. Music is the soundtrack to the crappy movie that is my life.
Chris Rock

I never tried to prove nothing, just wanted to give a good show. My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it on the public. The main thing is to live for that audience, 'cause what you're there for is to please the people.
Louis Armstrong

I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.
Nina Simone

I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
Nina Simone, Nina Simone Interview

I wanted to be different and original but still have it be something my fans could get into. There also are some big, beautiful ballads. I told my producers that I wanted tracks that are going to blow up in the clubs, but I also wanted songs that were very melodic and with a lot of instrumentation.
Aaliyah, USA Today

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
Nina Simone

I'm a musician at heart. I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.
Nat King Cole

I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own.
Paul Robeson, The Whole World In His Hands

If it hadn't been for Jazz, there wouldn't be no rock and roll.
Louis Armstrong

If kids say I'm just a gospel rapper, I won't be able to get in their cars.
MC Hammer

If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out.
Louis Armstrong

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.
James Weldon Johnson

It's fun to be creative and innovative and come up with something crazy. So I need people to work with who are not going to be afraid to take it to the left a bit.
Aaliyah, The Daily Telegraph in London

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Nina Simone

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
Louis Armstrong

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
Maya Angelou

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong

My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.
Louis Armstrong

Never play a thing the same way twice.
Louis Armstrong

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.
Billie Holiday

Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of like half-fast.
Louis Armstrong

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
James Weldon Johnson

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
Bill Cosby

O Black and unknown bards of long ago,/ How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
James Weldon Johnson, Black and Unknown Bards

Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
Stanley Crouch

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.
Ralph Ellison

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Louis Armstrong

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.
Louis Armstrong

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.
Louis Armstrong

This is it for a winner, Dance to this and you're gonna get thinner, Move slide your rump, Just for a minute let's all do the bump, Bump, bump, bump yeah.
MC Hammer, You Can?t Touch This

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong

When I go to the Gate, I'll play a duet with Gabriel. Yeah, we'll play 'Sleepy Time Down South' and 'Hello, Dolly!.' Then he can blow a couple that he's been playing up there all the time.
Louis Armstrong

When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
Nina Simone

You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.
Billie Holiday