When I was seventeen, I discovered some of my mom's old blues records.
I'd been a music kid since fifth grade with Casey Kasem's Top 40. New Wave in middle school. Classic rock in high school.
These records were a new world – not just musically, but racially too.
You see, these old blues musicians were Black, and almost everything I listened to was performed by White artists.
Of course I never thought about that as I danced at a New Order concert or played air guitar along with Jimmy Page.
Once I discovered the music of Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Gary Davis, Memphis Minnie, and so many others, I also became interested in their lives.
Most of them were not professional musicians. They were farmers or cotton pickers or shoeshiners or janitors or maids.
They played music at dances, bars, and cafes or, if they were lucky, at concerts put on by White ethnomusicologists.
In the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, while they entertained White audiences with their music, they were barred from the restaurants and hotels and bars where they played because they were Black.
Curiosity about the lives of these long dead Black musicians was the beginning of my appreciation of the lived experiences of people not like me.
My appreciation for the vast dynamism of the human condition.