Why I Think God Sings The Blues.

In the summer as a child, I would stay with my maternal Grandmother for a whole week. To most kids, this would have been torture. Not me. This was a rare treat. I got a vacation. I watched reruns of the Twilight Zone (ON CABLE!!!), ate pizza that Grandpa Ray brought home from his night delivery job at Domino's, and we ate breakfast at McDonald's every day with their gut-wrenching coffee. I got to stay up late, sleep late, and make lots of squirtguns out of the dozens of empty Nasonex bottles that Grandma kindly left laying about.

But I always went home on Sunday after Church.

Now my Grandmother didn't go to the liberal whitebread Baptist church that we did. No, Grandma went to the Southern Baptist church on third street downtown. It was always a treat to go to church with Grandma, if for no other reason than the music. Sure they had a choir that could really belt out a hymn. Sure they had an organist that knew her way around an organ, and the minister could pound out a heavy-handed sermon against sin and vice, thumping the bible all the while.

But they had a band with an electric guitar, and Dear Lord did it sound like Heaven!

Now mind you, we are the only two white folks in perhaps eighty to a hundred people, but I have never felt so at home in all my life. They played the blues like their souls depended on it. They were free with their troubles, and their lament was beautiful in it's sadness, and the Holy Spirit and divine spark that is in us all seemed to shine a little brighter there than any other place I could name. It was truly moving in a way that words fail me.

For a brief moment that young man on the guitar was enfused with B. B. King, Fats Waller, Sonny Boy Williams, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Jesus Christ all at once. I had never been to a church service that amounted in so many tears of joy and love.

After all, God has a lot to sing the blues about.

With this in mind, let me give you a little taste of what God has on his iPod.

I have seen this man in concert at the Newport Music Hall and he was amazing! His albums don't do him justice.

Cheers,

Doc