— By the 1960s, with the forward-looking civil rights movement and ‘black power’ becoming part of the lexicon, young African-Americans had little interest in the weary defeat of the early country blues field recordings. They were drawn instead to brightly propulsive Motown and Black soul. Page 60, 61: Williamson, Nigel, ‘The Rough Guide to the Blues’ (Rough Guides, 2007)

— Keith Richards later claimed that when the Rolling Stones arrived at Chess Studios in Chicago in 1964 blues legend Muddy Waters was up a ladder with a paintbrush, and later helped the Stones lug their equipment around. Page 61: Williamson, Nigel, ‘The Rough Guide to the Blues’ (Rough Guides, 2007)

— According to blues collector Lawrence Cohn, the studio had been made to look like a small club and more people were present than could fill a New York coffeehouse. Page 148, 149, Beaumont, Daniel, ‘Preachin' the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House’ (Oxford University Press, 2011)

— But not according to Waterman. As he had it, House might have been ‘painfully polite’, someone who always said thank you when he signed an autograph, but he ‘was nobody's Uncle’. Responding to a policeman who wrongly suspected him of [casing] beachfront houses in Malibu, Waterman recalls the way House plainly spoke his mind. Waterman, Dick, ‘Father of Folk Blues’, Notes (Sony Music Entertainment, 1965)

— Did he roll his eyes back in his head as the song transported him away, as he would do when playing in the Mississippi Delta, or blink as if waking again into the present as he finished? Page 200: Williamson, Nigel, ‘The Rough Guide to the Blues’ (Rough Guides, 2007)