"Big Eighty left Savannah, Lord and did not stop..."

Son House. Robert Johnson. Blind Willie McTell. Charlie Patton. Mississippi John Hurt. Lemon Jefferson. Leadbelly. Skip James. Blind Willie Johnson.

These are magical names to me. Most everyone who loves music loves one kind above all others. For me it's Delta Blues. It's been preserved precariously on a few old recordings, laid down in terrible conditions at haste and for little or no compensation. Aluminum masters were melted down for scrap long ago. All that survives are a handful of records, time worn and all but forgotten. It's a minor miracle that this music survived at all.

But what we have of it is wonderful. It rises above the scratches and haze of those old acetate 78's, fragile and fleeting, like a ghost or a dream. But it carries with it powerful imagery from another time, another culture, another world.

There is something very true about this music. You can tell it comes from the heart, from very real pain and desperation. It's honest, perhaps the most honest kind of music we have access to. This is a sound designed, not by some focus group or record producer, but by life itself. By necessity. It had to come out. And it refuses to die.