The wonderful writer Albert Murray, a jazz historian, told me that during the era of slavery in the U.S. – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: they could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the blues.

He says something else which sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room were it’s being played. So please remember that.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country.