The Blues

I've always thought that if someone offered to give me an extensive set of the best of one kind of music, I would choose the blues. 

I listen to a variety of music and have CDs in almost every genre. Still, there's something about the blues, from Stevie Ray Vaughn to BB King. Maybe it's my Southern roots, maybe growing up in a small, country Baptist church where we had "singings" in the summer that went late into Saturday night, usually led by a three- or four-man gospel group from another church. I don't know that we paid them. I doubt we had the money. Lake Cindy Baptist probably never had  more than 100 people in the building at one time. We had a small wooden sign in the front of the church that listed the number of members, number attending the previous Sunday, how much money we took in, and maybe how much we owed. Whether the groups who came through warranted an actual paycheck or not, they sang all the old standards, minus the 3rd stanza, which Baptists never sing, to our satisfaction. And because they sang the old standards, we knew the words and joined in, singing and clapping, rocking on the hard wooden benches. Music like that gets into your blood, and some people would be surprised at the energy Baptists can whip up on a Saturday night.

Church music influenced Elvis, too, and I grew up listening to every Elvis album and singing every song and seeing every movie over and over, though we recognized that the early movies showed his true talent, the later his ability to ride on the fruits of early talent. Elvis and rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis all came from the Southern blues tradition, which came from the church as much as the cotton fields.

So maybe I hold an especial affinity for the blues because its vestiges were bred in me from the beginning. Or maybe the simple chords and beating rhythm speak to something primal in us all. I can only say that the Blind Boys' version of Amazing Grace was--well, amazing.