Word: delta
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...young performer, perhaps moving to the industrial beat of the factories around him, helped loose the lightning-charged sound that would power American music - blues, rock and even hip-hop - for the remainder of the century. Hooker, like Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Elmore James, took the Mississippi Delta blues and shocked it into modernity, revitalizing the still-youthful music with electric guitars. Hooker's songs were desperate and desolate but enlivened with boogie-woogie energy. His instrumental skills matched his vocal prowess; his guitar playing was spare, sharp and menacing, like a broken beer bottle brandished...
...Like the sea, like the sky, like a pair of Levi's, like that Miles Davis song, Hooker was all blues. In fact, Miles once said that Hooker was so infused with the sound of the Delta that he described the bluesman as "buried up to his neck in mud." Hooker wasn't all blues all by himself: there was Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton before him, B.B. King and Muddy Waters right there with him, and many, many performers after him. Early in their careers, the Rolling Stones opened for Hooker. Early in his career, Bob Dylan shared...
...Hooker's most significant accomplishments was that he took an essentially rural form of music, Delta blues, and made it tough enough for the city, strong enough to support all the rock and roll that would come after it. Hooker once said "the blues is a pick-up. It's not a letdown." Although he sang sad songs like "Hobo Blues" and "My First Wife Left Me" and "It Serves Me Right (To Suffer)", Hooker was searching for catharsis, not pathos; he was looking to chase pain away, not to simply revel in it. "What do music do? It keeps...
...first learned how to take full advantage of airline, charge-card, hotel and rental-car points through my business-travel experience. Like many other travelers, I was a member of half a dozen different airline-loyalty programs, including Delta Air Lines, whose frequent-flyer plan I joined in 1988. Then, in 1995, owing more to convenient flight schedules than to a determined strategy, I flew enough miles to qualify for Delta's Silver Medallion status (the lowest of three tiers of Medallion status, each with its own perks). I always thought those elite programs were for moguls, not mere mortals...
...this is not an advertisement for the Gritti Palace, Delta Air Lines or some credit card that offers rewards for loyalty. But it is a true story about how I managed to get the most out of these programs...