Elwood Blues

With some help from IMBD.com, today I'd like to feature the speech that Elwood Blues gives the rest of the band when they all want to give up and go home before making the trip into Louisiana to audition for Queen Mousette so they can play in the battle of the blues bands.  The speech comes from the second movie of the Blues Brothers franchise.  The original 1980 movie is by far the better of the two, but the 2000 film has its merits, too.

Take it away, Elwood.

ELWOOD: [addressing the rest if the band] You may go if you wish. But remember this: walk away now and you walk away from your crafts, your skills, your vocations; leaving the next generation with nothing but recycled, digitally-sampled techno-grooves, quasi-synth rhythms, pseudo-songs of violence-laden gangsta-rap, acid pop, and simpering, saccharine, soulless slush. Depart now and you forever separate yourselves from the vital American legacies of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, Memphis Slim, Blind Boy Fuller, Louie Jordon, Little Walter, Big Walter, Sonnyboy Williamson I and II, Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson, Elvis Presley, Lieber and Stoller, and Robert K. Weiss.

DONALD "DUCK" DUNN: Who is Robert K. Weiss?
[the rest of the band shrug]

ELWOOD:  Turn your backs now and you snuff out the fragile candles of Blues, R&B and Soul, and when those flames flicker and expire, the light of the world is extinguished because the music which has moved mankind through seven decades leading to the millennium will whither and die on the vine of abandonment and neglect.
[he walks off, followed by Buster, Mack and then the rest of the band]

 And, scene.
Nicely spoken, Elwood.

P. S.  Robert K Weiss was the producer for the original Blues Brothers movie, and the reference is given as an inside joke when Weiss told Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis not to give up on the film.  Don't give up on the film and don't give up on the Blues.