Creativity Quote by Jay McShann

McShann’s line is a tidy little biography and a not-so-tidy American history lesson. “My family was a Christian family” lands first as respectability, order, the Sunday architecture of Black life in the early 20th century: church as refuge, discipline, and public face in a country built to misread you. Then he pivots: “But I had to get to Kansas to play the blues.” That “but” does heavy lifting. It’s not rejecting Christianity so much as admitting that salvation and truth don’t always live in the same room.

Kansas here isn’t just geography; it’s permission. McShann came up in Kansas City’s wide-open nightlife, where jam sessions ran hot, bands competed like prizefighters, and swing and blues mixed into a sound that could feed you if you could survive it. The subtext is that the blues required a different kind of schooling than church offered: the secular apprenticeship of late nights, rent parties, clubs, liquor, heartbreak, and the everyday grind that “respectable” institutions often sanitize. You don’t learn that language in a pew; you learn it on the bandstand.

The phrase also smuggles in class and migration. “Had to get to Kansas” suggests leaving home wasn’t a romantic choice, it was an economic necessity and an artistic one. McShann frames the blues as a destination you earn by moving through the world’s rougher corridors. The line works because it refuses a neat split between sacred and profane; it implies they’re in dialogue, and the blues is what happens when faith meets reality and has to tell the truth anyway.