Blues: Why you can still love the USA

Reading time: 3 min.
In Munich, Marcus King conjures up the unbroken power of the blues and the American South – and revives the feeling of overwhelming that once characterized rock'n'roll.
The blues is colorblind. If it grabs hold of someone, it wrings their soul out, tears their heart to pieces, and smothers their last remaining strength with a heavy blanket of loneliness. It doesn't matter where you come from, even if it's a slightly pale 29-year-old from South Carolina wearing a huge cowboy hat and a truck driver's vest. And so Marcus King sang on Thursday in Munich about homesickness, jealousy, and self-loathing. He has written songs with titles like "Soul It Screams," "Too Much Whiskey," and "Blues Worse Than I Ever Had." As desperate as that sounds, it is still precisely these abysses that drive this music , which was fed by the blues, for which people like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan found in their voices and guitars precisely those loyal lovers that life denied them. Those who don't know pain will never be able to play the blues.
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