Charles Pierce:

Much of what the world loves about America was provided by Americans who America didn’t much love for most of its history, and when the music began to batter down the mental walls we’d thrown up between black citizens and white citizens, it was a powerful covert operation that couldn’t be beaten back with police dogs, or fire hoses, or the entire legal, political, and social architecture of American apartheid. And this president knows that, and the people who are sniping at him now know it, too, and it’s driving them around the bend. Because the president knows, as we’ve all come to know, one simple truth that binds us all as Americans, even though it’s not always self-evident — that the blues is about salvage, about a carrying forward, and about recognizing the common hellhounds that stay on all of our trails.

-- http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_President_And_The_Blues