Given the Blues

"When that sense of irony, pathos, joy and sarcastic, biting humor can be made to sing the story of the wounded yet laughing heart--a heart that cannot heal but will not die--then we have the expressive blues: that moaning, groaning wail of wonder that streams down Harlem streets into the 1920's nights; that pulsates through speakeasies filled with new city migrants, who are lost in the northern, so-called promised land, but who are hallowed and made whole by pumping piano music in an all night bar." "The question is not whether you have them, but whether you can stop living them enough to play them." From Jeffrey Stewart's "Given the Blues"