John Lee Hooker once said that the blues “tells a story.” “Every line of the blues has a meaning,” explained Hooker, who had escaped his fate as a sharecropper in the harsh Mississippi Delta by electrifying the blues and telling his own story. I can relate to Hooker. I, too, was born in the Mississippi Delta, at a hospital in B.B. King’s hometown of Indianola to be exact. My mother tells me that the hospital nurses rocked me to sleep by singing the blues. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The Delta was full of blues, and while growing up there, I became painfully aware that the source of that mournful, soulful-but-sad music, still lived in the soil, moved in the air and rose in the heat of that flatland. I never wanted to stay in the Delta. As a young man, I wrote songs about leaving. I was always waiting for someone or something to take me away. In hindsight, I was, in fact, living through the Delta blues. The closest I came to escaping the Delta to sing my songs for a living w