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blues
in a sentence

blues as in:  sings the blues

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  • The smoky aroma hits us on the sidewalk, and a blues song pours outside.†   (source)
  • Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues.†   (source)
  • Long loops and strands of yarn dangled out of the cubbyholes, and the browns and grays and purples were mixed in with the ochres and olive greens and dark blues.†   (source)
  • Her newest blog post was titled "The John Hughes Blues," and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favor ite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separate trilogies: The "Dorky Girl Fantasies" trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the "Dorky Boy Fantasies" trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off).†   (source)
  • Hot pinks, violent blues, red and white beach balls, the fluorescent green of plastic, the sun blazing down like a spotlight.†   (source)
  • Before long, someone saw him in his blues, and that cemented his fate, that memorable but tenuous connection to Paul Bunyan, or rather, to his beast of burden: Babe the Blue Ox.†   (source)
  • It glowed in alternating reds and yellows and blues under the overhead lighting.†   (source)
  • Mrs. Traynor gazed out the windows, to where her precious garden had begun to bloom, its blossoms a pale and tasteful melding of pinks, mauves, and blues.†   (source)
  • Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues†   (source)
  • Rock and roll, big band, the blues.†   (source)
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show 190 more examples with any meaning
  • Blues in the Night,†   (source)
  • And blues, too.†   (source)
  • The clouds present diffuse bands of tender grays and blues, and below them the ocean does the same.†   (source)
  • Herman E. Calloway was making everybody feel like they had the blues, it looked like Mr. Jimmy'd just wiped some tears from his eyes too.†   (source)
  • "Well, this is plain gorgeous," Bailey said, surveying the coral and vegetation in lemons and blues and burgundies.†   (source)
  • They play the juke joint blues.†   (source)
  • In truth, Phoenix still resembled a shallow sea, marred by the fake greens and blues of swimming pools.†   (source)
  • Now the stone was covered with hunting tapestries, vivid with greens and browns and blues, and yet still it seemed to Ned Stark that the only color in the hall was the red of blood.†   (source)
  • SCHOOL BLUES.†   (source)
  • I like those low-down blues.†   (source)
  • The air was cool on his skin, almost crisp, and the sky was a haze of different colors: black directly above him like a mountain peak, then blues of infinite range, becoming lighter until it met the horizon, where gray took its place.†   (source)
  • And when Holly took her tenor sax, set herself up outside the door that looked onto the park, and played the blues, the hounds all ran to form her chorus.†   (source)
  • troy: My daddy ain't had them walking blues!†   (source)
  • The sky is whirling above me, all blues and pinks and reds swirling together until it looks like parts of the sky are bleeding.†   (source)
  • So when I want to cry the blues I just recall the centipede.†   (source)
  • Them Muggles are coming, yeh see, with their flashing blues and they won't 'preciate a big lummox like me, would they?†   (source)
  • Where Elise and Natalie were in respectable deep blues, Celeste's dress was practically white.†   (source)
  • His grandparents sent him home after Hill Street Blues.†   (source)
  • The paintings too—mostly oils in deep blues and greens—had sea themes.†   (source)
  • Those beautiful baby blues?†   (source)
  • The lake would sparkle with reds and blues and greens, like a mirror, and the picnickers would make low sounds of appreciation.†   (source)
  • Everything was distorted: colors had weird, exotic tints; blues were more prominent now, while greens and reds were subdued.†   (source)
  • His eyes are very warm, not like Nick's frozen blues.†   (source)
  • "I'm calling it 'The Girlfriend's-Going-to-Juilliard-Leaving-My-Punk-Heart-in-Shreds Blues," ' he said, singing the title in an exaggeratedly twangy voice.†   (source)
  • He swirled his brush in one of the blues, then handed it to me.†   (source)
  • Together, in this darkness floating to sleep, they were like a distant blues tune heard in an almost deserted night club, melancholy but pleasing.†   (source)
  • Pencil drawings, lots of them colored in blues and greens and reds.†   (source)
  • I see the possibility of laughter in your baby blues.†   (source)
  • When Day wasn't working the night shift, he and Henrietta spent evenings at home, playing cards and listening to Bennie Smith play blues guitar on the radio after the kids went to sleep.†   (source)
  • Blues, jazz or a huapango — he can play almost anything.†   (source)
  • More like Eurasian funk and blues with a message, and a great beat.†   (source)
  • Those blues, however, seemed to be long behind her.†   (source)
  • Sonny's Blues" is about redemption, but not the one students have been conditioned to expect.†   (source)
  • He didn't encourage them because, as he put it, "I don't hang with the blues.†   (source)
  • I supposed the place was named after the blues musician, but it seemed a little ominous considering the waters I was getting ready to sail through.†   (source)
  • Perenelle had quickly come to understand that ghosts could not see certain colors blues and greens and some tints of yellow and so she deliberately encouraged those colors into her aura, carefully creating a shield that rendered her invisible in the particular Shadowrealm where the shades of the dead gathered.†   (source)
  • I stood on the tarmac in dress blues as the plane came in.†   (source)
  • And who ever heard of blues flute?†   (source)
  • Speaking of unappealing states, Larkin, why don't you show us those baby blues, I mean yellows?†   (source)
  • A death blues for Mr. Cong.†   (source)
  • Now Mother's shack is the mere peak of a roof surrounded by a blaze of pinks, blues, oranges.†   (source)
  • Attired in full dress blues, my new Purple Heart pinned on my chest, close to my Trident, I walked into the Oval Office.†   (source)
  • Abruptly there was color everywhere: the yellow streetcars and the sudden blues of telegraph boys jolting past with satchels full of joy and gloom; cab drivers lighting the red night-lamps at the backs of their hansoms; a large gilded lion crouching before the hat store across the street.†   (source)
  • He tells Nathaniel he'll go on right before Mickey Champion, a blues singer turned public school cafeteria worker whose career Rivera is trying to revive, even though she's old enough to be his grandmother.†   (source)
  • I've never seen colors so intense, not just blue and yellow and red, but the deepest blues and brightest yellows and most vibrant reds you've ever seen.†   (source)
  • Colored lights played over the dance floor, turning it into a multicolored fairyland of blues and acid greens, hot pinks and golds.†   (source)
  • In Ray Charles's absence, their North Carolina twanged blues made us sad enough.†   (source)
  • Two Blues and a Yellow.†   (source)
  • His vision swam, blacks and blues and purples all meshing together, inseparable.†   (source)
  • She'd spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten.†   (source)
  • He had been fascinated by the colors of the desert, the blues, the purples, the yellows of the minerals lying on the surface of the earth.†   (source)
  • Sometimes people want to put Kenna in the rhythm-and-blues category, which irritates him because he thinks people do that just because he's black.†   (source)
  • I mean—" Her big blues blinked.†   (source)
  • I guessed I'd resolved the soul and sin thing by lapsing from my heavy-duty Catholic background, giving up my immortal soul for a blues kind of soul.†   (source)
  • Papa took one look at me and saw I had a bad case of the ringtail blues.†   (source)
  • Jo-Jo was a five-foot-tall Puerto Rican whose light skin was stippled with moles and whose blues eyes were the color of larimar.†   (source)
  • Don't let them blues in here.†   (source)
  • Sonny Rollins's "Sonnymoon for Two," a midtempo blues.†   (source)
  • Pastel yellows and greens, soft blues and pinks intermingled—she wasn't about to lay any bets on whether they would be boys or girls, she joked.†   (source)
  • "Welcome to my office," he says, reaching down, turning up the radio, playing some mellow rhythm and blues.†   (source)
  • As they work, the radio is on and a Southside disk-jockey program is inappropriately filling the house with a rather exotic saxophone blues.†   (source)
  • When she was sober she hummed mostly or chanted blues songs, of which she knew many.†   (source)
  • They were also painted an array of pastel colors, candy pinks and sky blues, bright, shiny yellows.†   (source)
  • No place ever came off well when a disease was named after it: Delhi belly, Baghdad blues, Turkey trots.†   (source)
  • A string of electric bulbs ran the length of the hall at either side and the bulbs were covered with paper bags that had been painted and the brushstrokes showed through in the light and the reds and greens and blues were all muted and much of a piece.†   (source)
  • Now the night had changed it from a place with pretty, well-tended gardens and marble water features into a magical fairy kingdom all washed in the light of the moon and shaded by layers of grays and silvers and midnight blues.†   (source)
  • Hip-hop artists, rappers, soul, rhythm and blues.†   (source)
  • Adam had requested that if killed in combat, he would be buried in his dress blues.†   (source)
  • The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.†   (source)
  • That when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, even if it meant terrible battles and tough days and nights at home?†   (source)
  • Row after row of cops in dress blues.†   (source)
  • A barrelhouse blues was being shouted over the stamping of feet on a wooden floor.†   (source)
  • Delaware, the smallest colony, had sent the largest battalion in the army, "the Delaware Blues," a force of 800 turned out in handsome red-trimmed blue coats, white waistcoats, buckskin breeches, white woolen stockings, and carrying fine, "lately imported" English muskets.†   (source)
  • The peaks were painted in garish, sugary colors—all pinks and violets and baby blues—and the sky, just before sunrise, was windless and clear.†   (source)
  • He stepped off the train in his Marine dress blues looking straight as a string.†   (source)
  • Max looked west to where fading bands of scarlet blended into starry blues.†   (source)
  • however, blowfish jeer insightful garfish, disparaging inappropriately, doing damage, even insulting benevolent, charming, jovial garfish, hurting and frustrating deeply; joy fades but hurt feelings bring just grief; inevitable irritation hastens feeling blue; however, jovial children declare happiness, blowfishes' evil causes dejection, blues accordingly, always glorify jolly, friendly garfish!]†   (source)
  • Bright blues quickly faded into darkness with stars glittering in the sky.†   (source)
  • Lights shimmered in the hot summer air, reds and yellows and blues, like jewels sprinkled from heaven.†   (source)
  • He could take something very jazzy, like "Tin Roof Blues," and whistle it so nice and easy—right while he was hanging stuff up in the closet—that it could kill you.†   (source)
  • It seemed that the colors and patterns of the plantings changed by the day under her skilled hands, the misty blues of forget-me-nots ceding to the rich midnight larkspurs, then easing to the soft pinks of the mallow flowers.†   (source)
  • It was the "Back Water Blues."†   (source)
  • "Georgia Blues," and "Good Ole Summertime," which she hummed, then played again, singing the words.†   (source)
  • Ragged piano blues.†   (source)
  • I believe that good barbecue needs sides the way good blues need rhythm, and that there is only one rule: Serve whatever you like, but whatever you serve, make it fresh.†   (source)
  • Delighted, Iona set the glass aside to open the gift, took out a sweater in dreamy blues.†   (source)
  • Puller stepped out of the Malibu dressed in his brand-new dress blues.†   (source)
  • Color snuck up under the collar of the standard-issue blues into her cheeks.†   (source)
  • The music was low, funky blues, and he swayed to it.†   (source)
  • ~~~SECTION BREAK~~~ Biloxi Blues Christian Archibald Herter graduated from Harvard University and had served as a US congressman and governor of the state of Massachusetts.†   (source)
  • Again shafts of light played a dramatic symphony of colour, pockets of darkness pierced by intersecting beams that washed over the brilliant yellows and reds and blues of the banks of flowers.†   (source)
  • Their selfish love of their treasure can sustain them indefinitely, and Icingdeath's hoard, though small compared to the vast mounds of gold collected by the huge reds and blues that lived in more populated areas, was the largest of any of the tundra-dwelling dragons.†   (source)
  • One of her poems, "Barely Audible," echoes imagery used by the legendary blues singer Billie Holiday in "Strange Fruit," about black lynchings.†   (source)
  • Each time Horace, in his Lord Fauntleroy blues, draws near, she looks as if she could strangle him, which only makes him want her the more.†   (source)
  • Giotto's blues and Caravaggio's shadows had been united to portray a tranquil forest in neither night nor day but, rather, in a condition of the spirit.†   (source)
  • They do the same with blues and reds and yellows.†   (source)
  • A-RAB Play it big with the baby blues.†   (source)
  • As Jan and Smith walked back to their car in the drizzling rain, with the country music wailing behind them in the front of the building and rhythm and blues blaring in the back, he exclaimed, "Whew!†   (source)
  • Blues all around my head.†   (source)
  • Before him now lay the path, illumined; and when he turned, he saw that the world that had been darkness was returned to him, magnificent in deep blues and grays and black, streaked gold.†   (source)
  • A cousin up from lowlands is playing his guitar and singing the blues.†   (source)
  • She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners, back when Abby was a toddler whining with hunger and tiredness and just general five p.m. blues.†   (source)
  • The sea breezes blew the dangling moss in time to his bluegrass blues.†   (source)
  • There were blues, reds, greens, and whites all jumbled together: a very good stained-glass window with the tropical sun staring straight through it at midday might have something the same effect.†   (source)
  • You don't dig the blues, do you, daddy?†   (source)
  • But the platform did give off glints and flickers of multicolored garments, greens and blues and reds, a swirl and flourish here and there of bright Mediterranean hue, piercing her with vivid longing for that land she had never seen except in books and in her fancy and summoning up instantly the child's verse she remembered from the convent school—skinny Sister Barbara chanting in her comic pebbly Slavic French: O que les iles de la Grece sont belles!†   (source)
  • On the white wall at the end of the room was a large oil painting of a European port, done in reds and yellows and blues.†   (source)
  • The light from the great red sun low down on the horizon was quite ample for human eyes, but Jan wondered how long it would be before he yearned for greens and blues.†   (source)
  • Christian act, Cured her blues.†   (source)
  • Nickelodeon, I request you please to play 'Empty Bed Blues' and let Bessie Smith sing.†   (source)
  • It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians and blues singers).†   (source)
  • But my head continued to throb with the measured insistence of a bass drum, and how could a toothache pass the calaboose, hear the songs of the prisoners, their blues and laughter, and not be changed?†   (source)
  • It takes a hesitating woman wanna sing the blues.†   (source)
  • I had to get the blues, good and proper.†   (source)
  • All my love, Melia * Lyrics from TOMBSTONE BLUES b~ Bob Dylan.†   (source)
  • So when I want to cry the blues I just recall the centipede.†   (source)
  • There were love messages: El Loco Con La Barbara, P/V (por villa) — and poetry: Pachuco blues.†   (source)
  • I seen plenty a womens get the baby blues after they done birthing.†   (source)
  • Willie still has that stack of old low-down blues—Tampa Red, Mercy Dee—you know, all of them.†   (source)
  • Ain't you never heard of nobody having the walking blues?†   (source)
  • Emma played old standards and show tunes, blues and waltzes.†   (source)
  • "I ain't as good as Jimi Hendrix," he said, "but he play them citified blues, anyway.†   (source)
  • And Greens aren't as affected as Blues and the others.†   (source)
  • There were pinks and blues and umber, topped by the platinum-blond nimbus of her hair.†   (source)
  • I'm thinking about writing a blues number for you.†   (source)
  • I can almost see em, swaying here in my kitchen, dancing to the blues.†   (source)
  • It was a blues, the tempo slow, and the two people danced close together.†   (source)
  • So let's review the facts those Blues gave us: Eddo.†   (source)
  • We think it's somewhere in this area, thanks to a few fairly unhelpful Blues we ran across in Ohio.†   (source)
  • I'm gonna call it "The Serious Stink Blues.†   (source)
  • "You know, I can play some blues," Peewee said.†   (source)
  • They picked him out of all of the Blues to be a runner for the control center of our camp.†   (source)
  • "The whole thing's pretty straightforward for us Blues," Liam explained.†   (source)
  • I bet a lot of the Blues at Thurmond figured out how to use their abilities.†   (source)
  • I've also discovered a new form of magic called blues music," the man continued.†   (source)
  • In the corner, he noted a portrait of a young marine in dress blues, standing at ease.†   (source)
  • The blues was having its sneaky-sad way with me lately.†   (source)
  • It was a chick singing... Give me red lipstick ... And a shot of good booze It was a slow blues.†   (source)
  • Deep blues and blacks surrounded her eyes.†   (source)
  • Vanessa stares at me with those big baby blues.†   (source)
  • He'd lain awake in the darkness with a parade of blues marching through his brain.†   (source)
  • Uniforms in the best dress blues flanked the perimeter for a full three blocks on Fifth.†   (source)
  • For the large living room was empty, and filled with the sound of the blues.†   (source)
  • "Um hmm," she nodded, her big blues fastened on me.†   (source)
  • Look at them, not a shack to pray in or an alley to sing the blues!†   (source)
  • How the woman managed to look cool and unperturbed in her sweltering blues, Eve didn't want to know.†   (source)
  • I remembered Sergeant Esterhaus's words in Hill Street Blues: "Let's be careful out there."†   (source)
  • With Chief Mercer, who was dressed in blues.†   (source)
  • Her blonde hair was cut short and she was outfitted in her dress blues.†   (source)
  • Manichaean Blues Band, a group he started back in San Antonio, where he's from.†   (source)
  • All I know is I ends up singin' the blues.†   (source)
  • The blues rise from the chipped tiles in the kitchen.†   (source)
  • "'Wedding Bell Blues,' they're calling it," he said tossing the morning's Chronicle in my face.†   (source)
  • Robert Johnson was singing his haunting blues somewhere in the dark.†   (source)
  • In the background, he heard Billie Holiday singing Billie's Blues.†   (source)
  • "If you get fancy for dinner, I didn't bring my dress blues," said Puller.†   (source)
  • Until I returned to Cuba, I never realized how many blues exist.†   (source)
  • Bessie sang, The blues has got me on the go.†   (source)
  • We surf-cast for blues, and cooked the fresh fish right there on the beach.†   (source)
  • She wore wire-rimmed glasses and a set of dress blues; her official cap was in her right hand.†   (source)
  • Low in his throat Vivaldo hummed the blues they had heard at the funeral.†   (source)
  • Frank sang the blues, and he drank too much.†   (source)
  • What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.†   (source)
  • Blues boomed from a tavern across the street.†   (source)
  • But she had a commodious bedstead, with a fine quilt on it, a summer one in light pinks and blues on a white ground; it was a Broken Staircase.†   (source)
  • We'd two-step across that floor, jiggle to some blues, then somebody maybe put a quarter in there and play a slow music song, and Lord we'd just get out there and shake and turn around and all like that!†   (source)
  • Every American should know enough of the blues to understand exactly what keys and locks signify, and to blush when they're referred to.†   (source)
  • But it was just my luck that blues flute is the one thing blues music been lacking and the minute I heard Germaine play I knew this for a fact.†   (source)
  • The winter quilts were of deeper colours than the summer ones, with reds and oranges and blues and purples; and some of them had silks and velvets and brocade pieces in them.†   (source)
  • It was all light blues with white furniture and a white fireplace with small stone lions on either side and another vase on a dark table filled with pink roses.†   (source)
  • Two of them had the same picture of Herman E. Calloway and the two guys but the first was called "Herman E. Calloway and the Terminally Unhappy Blues Band," they were called "Masters of the Delta Blues," and the other one was called "Herman E. Calloway and the Gifted Gents of Gospel—Featuring Miss Grace 'Blessed' Thomas's Vocals," they were the "Servants of the Master's Salvation."†   (source)
  • Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound.†   (source)
  • It was a time when depression was often thought of as the blues rather than a treatable medical condition, and in my family, it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to get help for the blues, especially from a shrink.†   (source)
  • As we come up to the top of the hill—all three of us panting a little from the climb—the bay unfolds to our right like a gigantic map, a sparkling, shimmering world of blues and greens.†   (source)
  • Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, big-bellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the black-and-blues, the occasional black eye.†   (source)
  • As the twisting sheets of dampness eddied and flowed, more and more skeletal and mummified remains were revealed in brief glimpses: soldiers in the tattered blues and grays of Civil War uniforms; farmers in rags of old-fashioned overalls; cowboys in worn chaps and torn denim; women in long, sweeping skirts, now moldy and ragged; miners in threadbare buckskins.†   (source)
  • I felt like a third-tier speaker at a mediocre convention, me in my business-casual blues, addressing a captive audience of jet-lagged people daydreaming about what they'd eat for lunch.†   (source)
  • She drove west, the day sunny and calm, the colors of the passing landscape simple and clear, blues and yellows and greens.†   (source)
  • And the wind gonna rise up, baby, and blow my blues away ...Soft and sweet and mellow, the song came back and lingered, following her down into a deeper sleep where thought ceased and the faces that came in dreams went unremembered.†   (source)
  • Sometimes oldies; the "Eastside Sound" revues, old Stax and Atlantic rhythm & blues: Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas, Solomon Burke and The Drifters.†   (source)
  • All afternoon Claude hunkers inside his shop above the hundreds of little bottles of florals and orientals and fougeres in his vitrine, pinks and carmines and baby blues, and no one enters, and an oscillating electric fan blows across his face to the left, then to the right, and he does not read or move at all except to periodically reach a hand beneath his stool and grab a handful of biscuits from a round tin and stuff them into his mouth.†   (source)
  • James Baldwin's wonderful short story "Sonny's Blues" deals with a rather uptight math teacher in Harlem in the 1950s whose brother serves time in prison for heroin possession.†   (source)
  • For Chicanos this influence lay particularly deep in music: Mexican rhythms syncopated with blues and ghetto beats.†   (source)
  • "Piano-roll Blues" was the first tune of the morning, as I recall; then came "Darktown Strutters' Ball."†   (source)
  • Happily, in the case of "Sonny's Blues," the story is so heavily anthologized that it's almost impossible not to find the answer—the phrase comes from Isaiah 51:17.†   (source)
  • Mama, of course, is glued to the color picture, oohing and aahing at the vibrant reds and blues of the team.†   (source)
  • And two or three times I've had a recent student in said substance abuse classes show up at discussions of "Sonny's Blues," very earnestly saying something like, "You should never give alcohol to a recovering addict."†   (source)
  • Then when themusic started taking a blues turn, it became the Coyote Blue Hemp Boogie Band and Joaquin Lopez learned to play a mean harmonica, as penetrating as any original blues man.†   (source)
  • At the end of James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues" (1957), the narrator sends a drink up to the bandstand as a gesture of solidarity and acceptance to his brilliantly talented but wayward brother, Sonny, who takes a sip and, as he launches into the next song, sets the drink on the piano, where it shimmers "like the very cup of trembling."†   (source)
  • The other Chicano in the band was a San Gabriel guitarist named Jose Palmas who had these magical fingers and could play anything from Wes Montgomery to Jeff Beck to Delta Blues to raunchy norterias.†   (source)
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meaning too rare to warrant focus:

show 2 examples with meaning too rare to warrant focus
  • He looks at me with those baby blues.   (source)
    blues = blue eyes
  • In the porch she found a crowd of little girls, all more or less gaily attired in whites and blues and pinks, and all staring with curious eyes at this stranger in their midst, with her extraordinary head adornment.   (source)
    blues = different shades of blue
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