Why we play the blues.

Just a few words tonight on why we play the blues.  It all started, as so many good things start, with a front porch pickin' party in Birthright, TX.  Which is more of a community than a town, it does have road signs marking it's location, but no post office.
Anyway, one night a friend brought a newcomer to the pickin' at our house.  The sounds this man played intrigued both Jack and myself.  I was a beginning guitar picker at the time and they showed great patience with me, he began teaching me the age old rhythm by stomping his foot while he played.  Of course, Jack caught on immediately.  He says he was born with the boogie woogie, so that may be why it came so easily for him.  The newcomer, an old white man,  also told us how the music he played had come to him from his granddad who got it from his granddad.  A line of river rats, he called his family.  And man, could he play the blues.
Jack and I had each heard the blues, but neither of us had gotten into the musical form in depth.  The rhythms we learned that night stayed with us and started us on our own musical journey.....he gave us just enough spark to light our own torch.....It quickly became our "thing."  Another way we related together.  The whole family joined in our interest, we began to seek out local blues players and Jack would play with them while the rest of us absorbed their presence.  Now, we're ruined...not a day goes by without us playing the blues, watching blues greats on video, and our ten year old son walks around reciting blues lyrics, especially those by Robert Johnson.
We started creating our own blues songs inadvertently.  While watching that horrible sight of New Orleans flooded after Katrina and hearing stories of survivors, I wrote a poem in a journal and left it laying on the coffee table.  Jack's boy picked it up and said "Hey, who wrote this song?"  The next thing I knew, the guys had put Flood Waters to music, and we began writing songs together.  The rest is the history of our blues.