Huh. As a Blues fan lucky enough to have lived in Chicago and to be good friends with Delmark owner Bob Koester's son, I did not know several things going into this:

- Personal dislike/preference for a given individual's artistic style or even their heritage influences their actual ability and merit as artists and human beings. Also, each television show must be every possible television show.

- Robert Johnson sang the blues. Extremely well. Better than Hugh Laurie. Hugh Laurie would totally deny it.

- Suffering in life, rather than practice added to talent, radically increases technical proficiency in music. As with any musical genre, blues musicians are performers, and the huge majority have been talented amateurs rather than geniuses who are also full time professionals.

- All African Americans and all European Americans sound alike, separately and equally, with no crossover. Toussaint MacColl and BB King in no way sound(ed) upper class compared with me. You can tell Dr. John from every single other blues musician in New Orleans just by listening, and Stevie Ray Vaughn sounded like his little brudduh.

- American folk music is way better than English or Scottish folk music. This is not subject to personal taste, do not dispute it.

- Hokey accents and deliberately malicious "Negro Minstrelry" are exactly the same thing.

- Hugh Laurie is a barely competent piano player.

I frankly can't imagine anyone who listened without prejudice coming to this last conclusion. I wager I could fool anyone with this opinion by merely detaching his image from a performance. I'd peg his singing voice as pleasant. In these qualities he is much like Thomas Dolby, one of my favorite musicians. Who incidentally gets to be a professional musician because I hear engineering pays awfully well when you're a genius inventor. I wouldn't complain if I could accompany myself at all on any instrument, so I'd be thrilled to be as average on guitar.