It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

...indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.

I grew up on popular music, and rock-and-roll expresses very deep feelings of those people who don't have a lot.

Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it's Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It's just the beat that changes.