"I am a Japanese. The blues was much very good, but this person listens for the first time. I am very splendid! I was impressed! Thank you!"

The Blues is the voice of the heart - we respond to it, regardless of background or nationality. It is unafraid to speak what is felt and does so without shame or artifice. It is as self-conscious as a newborn. Its scope is inclusive, it does not separate people emotionally. Blues is human music - at once approachable and warm, welcoming and understanding. It opens its arms and lakes the listener in. Speaking to that common core shared by all mankind - our joy, our pain, our longings and out desires, the Blues has become great and important because it dwells on the primal. The power if this fact was grasped completely by the American artists who later helped invent jazz,country and, eventually, rock 'n roll. The leap from the early Blues verse, echoing out of Mississippi, "Baby, please don't go..." to Motown's unashamed statement, "Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin'" is as short as it is simple.

Famed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, speaking of the power of myth and its diminished role in modern society, suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society. And that is society as a whole of which he speaks - black and white. Our shared humanity.

Blues, as an art form, was created and perfected by southern Blacks. There is nothing particularly Black in its subject matter, in the general sense. But it is all about being Black in the specific sense. The Blues and being Black are inextricably linked.

The holds of slave ships carried humanity, not luggage. No pots, no pans, no family pictures, no cedar chests filled with homespun. The space for heirlooms was confined to the four or so inches between the ears of the cargo. From the physical meagerness of this beginning, came a rich treasure. Free of the intellectual constraints of European tradition and reduced to a social and economic status where they had nothing left to lose, those new arrivals eventually turned inward, unpacking what they had brought with them - their basic humanity. They set it to rhyme and meter and nestled it into twelve musical bars. In so doing, they created something that forever raised them far above the meagerness of that origin and, at the same time, gave an undeserved gift to their captors and their descendants. They made us all very splendid, indeed.