from a discussion regarding traditional blues music and why it matters so deeply to some folks:

Us kids in Ann Arbor who worked the Blues & Jazz festivals in the early 1970s really got it right between the ears. Hanging out with One String Sam when I was sixteen provided what was for me unprecedented context, up close. The music has to make sense to your heart, and we still have a lot of cultural fissures in the body politic. If, for example, blues musicians keep beginning songs with the phrase "I woke up this morning", the words & tones directly reference the fact that harsh realities are especially challenging when encountered before the dawn has finished breaking. Repetition, I've got to point out, can be an extremely powerful tool. Say things twice or thrice and make sure that maybe--hopefully--the message is getting across. That to me is the kernel of the familiar formula.

I've reviewed a lot of CD compilations packed with 78 rpm recordings that were never intended to be heard one after the next, but rather as a single platter with one song on each side. What I realized one afternoon was that 24 songs sounding remarkably alike may be understood as verses in one piece lasting at times more than one hour. It's a ritual, not necessarily entertainment, although some rituals or parts therein may trigger something like what we understand as a sense of being entertained. In a larger way, if a whole lot of people are all singing what sound like similarly stated verses to the same song, to me that indicates that the ritual has expanded exponentially, and frankly that fills me with hope. But not everybody is going to tap into this.