Hello, it's Eric. I wanted to talk about the death and the afterlife of the blues.

Now the difficulty in talking about the blues is that people do not have a common picture

of what I mean. Some will hear in the phrase, the blues, your reference to mood. Others

will associate it with the music that fits a depressed state of mind. And musicians will

hear it as a reference to a class of structured music analogous to sonata form in western

classical music or the ritualized three-part structure of a classical Indian concert.

Well, permit me to pretend that you were where I was as a young man coming of age, which

is that I knew nothing about it. All I knew was that I loved rock and roll, and that within

rock there were certain songs more than others that I would listen to over and over again.

And oddly, I would notice several names recurring on the song credits. For example, W. Dixon,

who the hell was W. Dixon, and the other name that came up repeatedly clearly sounded

like a petition blue blood senator, McKinley Morganfield. There were others, of course, as

well. Ellis McDaniel sounded Scottish to me as a name, but he wrote like he was straight

out of Texarkana. This was confusing. All these rock bands knew about these guys and played

their songs, but these names weren't listed on any performances. So who were these people

and why did I love everything that they did? I asked around in my circle of family and

friends, and no one had an answer or even thought the question particularly interesting.

So one day, in the days before the internet, I went to the tower record store on sunset

boulevard in Hollywood near where we lived and determined that I would screw up my curds

to ask. Now, I say that for the benefit of those of you who may not regularly visit

record stores or musical instrument shops because you may not understand who works behind

the counter and on the floor. Music is a weird sector of the economy because it behaves

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