"When the blues hit the hardest"

This website is dedicated to gothic country, southern gothic, gothic americana, american gothic and dark americana and ...whatever. It doesn't concern itself with blues in any shape or form. However, there’s nothing in the statutes which prohibits a detour now and them. Like now. During my university studies, a friend introduced me to blues guitarist and singer Son Seals. I was cautiously negative. I don't dislike blues per se, but I'm not overly exaggerated about it either. Maybe, I have been listening to the wrong kind of blues: tedious twelve-bar blues with generic lyrics like "woke up this morning and my woman was gone". The album The Son Seals Blues Band was placed on the turntable. Track four "Your love is like a cancer" made sound waves through the loudspeakers. I was hit in solar plexus. This was something different. Pounding drums, rolling bass lines and an organ(!), and last but not least, a tormented guitar. "Your love is just like a cancer, woman / Lord, eating away my life". I was blown away by the gritty Chicago blues (although Son Seals was born in Arkansas). Later, I listened to another song from the second album Midnight Son from 1976. The song was "Going Back Home". "Sometimes I wonder, why'd I ever leave home? / Sometimes I wonder, why'd I ever leave home? / I had a few dollars in my pocket / Oh, now that little change is gone". The rest of the lyrics is filled with pain and suffering. The city is a mean place and going back home isn't an option. The train has left the station, literally and figuratively. "Mmm, hmm, what in the world am I gonna do?". The vocals and the guitar playing are exquisite. This is music with an authentic nerve and it still hit as hard as it did when I first heard the artist in the mid 1980s. Son Seals passed away in 2004. In 2009, Seals was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, in the category Performer. Rightly so.