For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression. In high school I had a friend who asked me why I played the blues, that black people don't play blues. And for the most part, he was right. But I said, how can you abandon what we came from? All that stuff you're jamming now came from this foundation. Jimmy Reed sang 'Big Boss Man' and, as a black man, he sang that because he couldn't say it in the workplace. If guys like that were ballsy enough to put that out, how can you deny it? That was the foundation to be able to say whatever the fuck you want.
