Many years ago, I had the opportunity to hang out with the great Mississippi Fred McDowell when he came to my college for a concert. We would up sitting up all night, drinking gin and smoking reefer, singing and playing guitars.

When Fred's manager, Dick Waterman, came by in the morning to collect Fred, Fred asked him "why didn't you get this white boy to record with me last week, instead of that kid Michael? He didn't understand the blues at all, but this kid really knows."

(Or words to that effect. It has been forty years or so, after all.)

Not long afterward, Fred's latest album "I Do Not Play No Rock n Roll" was released, and I realized that "that kid Michael" with whom Fred had recently recorded, and whom he had disparaged at my expense, was none other than the late great Mike Bloomfield, someone I still greatly admire as an electric-guitar virtuoso. But as a vocalist, I suppose, and as a true interpreter of that real deep-down down-home feeling, maybe I really am (or at least really was) even better...

Or, maybe I was just nicer (i.e., more deferential) to Fred than someone else my age who was very successful and widely recognized as a musician, and perhaps just a little bit full of himself ~ ???