This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes

                                              Aesop                                        

"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN’s "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn’t deserve congratulations. I think that’s reprehensible, I think it’s dishonest, and I think it’s shameful."

Sounds like sour grapes, but it's pretty sweet compared to the good old days when Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a"hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."  To which Adams replied that Vice President Jefferson was "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." 

Jefferson:  " Fool!"

Adams:  "Weakling!"

Jefferson: "Hypocrite!"

Adams: " Atheist!"

Jefferson: "Criminal!"

Adams: "Libertine!"

Jefferson: " Tyrant!"

Adams: "Coward!"

and then on...

...March 4, 1801,  a balding, toothless cantankerous old John Adams, got in a carriage at 4:00 am and left Wash. DC for Massachusetts, only 8 hours before Chief Justice John Marshall swore in the new president, Thomas Jefferson.  In doing so he became the only living president to choose NOT to be there for the successor's inauguration.

But Adams lived long enough to see his son John Quincy become president in 1825...though he died before the next election cycle and missed all the fun of hearing Andrew Jackson calling his son "a pimp" and Jackson calling Adams' wife "a slut." 

but enough about entitled wig wearing whiners, I'd rather hang with those whose gripes are rooted in pain not of their own making...

Ain't got the change of a nickel

Ain't got no bounce in my shoes

Ain't got no fancy to tickle

I ain't got nothin, but the blues

Slaves calling out field hollers with coded messages to fool their masters; chants and work-songs to relieve the tedium and pain of backbreaking labor; hymns to invoke the presence of a merciful creator; revival shouts and reflective reveries to purge the poisons of an embittered spirit; spontaneous versifying; funeral dirges and marches; lyric, melodic and rhythmic repetition and syncopation to keep the heart beating in time to nature’s call to physical freedom, spiritual pride and sexual release, all built upon the simple foundation of a 12 bar progression with 3 chords and a five note scale called The Blues.


Ain't got no rest in my slumbers
Ain't got no winners to lose
Lost all my telephone numbers
I ain't got nothin, but the blues

“...I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do"

 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.” 

― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ain't got no coffee that's perkin'

Ain't got no feelin's to bruise

Ain't got a job that's workin

I ain't got nothin, but the blues.

"Blues means what milk does to a baby."
Alberta Hunter

Memphis Earlene Gray(aka Judith Podell)  wrote a long (with tongue placed firmly in cheek) list of Blues requirements…with help from Uncle Plunky, revisions by Little Blind Patti D. and Dr. Stevie Franklin)

Among them…

The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in a ditch.

Teenagers can't sing the Blues. They ain't fixin' to die yet. 

Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada-- Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. 

You cannot have the blues in any place that don't get rain.

Guy with male pattern baldness ain't the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is.

You can't have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting is all wrong. 

It ain’t the Blues if you wear a suit, 'less you happen to be old  and you slept in it.

Blues is not a matter of color. Ugly luckless white people got a leg up on the blues.

The following are NOT Blues beverages:

 a. mixed drinks

 b. kosher wine

 c. Snapple

 d. sparkling water

Persons with names like Sierra, Auburn and Rainbow can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

I don't care how tragic your life: if you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues.

Well, then I guess I better shut up about it...and just play somethin...


Now I know this isn't gonna please the purists, or those who think the singer should turn the mike over to someone with real pipes, or the many who prefer their blues raw, dirty and homegrown--but I love it cause  it's such a great marriage of a blues foundation with an overlay of interesting harmonic sophistication.  Ford is a bluesman through and through (he was Jimmy Witherspoon's guitar player for years), but he's also a knowledgeable musician who uses his technique (with a horn player's phrasing)  and extensive vocabulary to make the music more challenging to play and listen to.  Song by Duke Ellington and Don George