It was a blues kind of day. Cloudy skies, thunder booming in the distance. The kind of day when old men, with their creaking bones, would come together and play. They would get their guitars and their dobros, their picks and their slides, and they would play the blues.

They’d play songs about God and Satan, songs about hell hounds and cheating women, songs about love and life and death.

With these wizened old masters teaching me, I was a decent guitarist by the time I was ten years old. But when it came to playing the blues, I could never get the feel of it. The notes didn’t come to me.

I didn’t understand it, until one day, one of the old men said to me, “It ain’t your fault, son.”

The rest of them chimed in and said, “Son, you gotta feel the blues ‘fore you can play the blues, and you ain’t felt no blues.”

I didn’t feel the blues until a few years later, when my father died. That was the day I picked up my guitar and played the blues with tears sliding down my face. That was a blues kind of day.