"The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me"

Blues music is presented as a direct conduit between lived experience and expression, a language forged from ordinary pressures: rent due, long shifts, strained love, unreliable promises, and the stubborn hope that tomorrow might come easier. It is not a curated emotion but a residue of daily life, where feelings accumulate through repeated encounters with scarcity, fatigue, and small victories. The music’s repetitive forms and bent notes mirror routines and irritations that return each day; the voice strains not for decoration but because life strains the voice.

The line about rich people asserts a boundary of knowledge, not intelligence but intimacy. Wealth can create a buffer from the cycles that make the blues necessary: precarity, humiliation, bargaining for dignity, living with consequences not chosen. One may appreciate the sound, collect the records, even perform the style; but without the friction of need and constraint, the deeper grammar of the blues remains foreign. It is a warning against mistaking consumption for comprehension, a defense of a culture produced under stress from being flattened into entertainment.

At the same time, this stance is more than gatekeeping. It protects a moral truth: the blues is not simply sadness; it is a disciplined reckoning with conditions that don’t change just because you feel them. Humor, irony, toughness, and the slow burn of endurance are part of its toolkit. These qualities grow where options are limited and improvisation is survival, not aesthetic flair. The music documents a community’s resourcefulness, carrying history inside its turns of phrase and its breaks in time.

People with comfort can suffer, of course, but the blues names a specific relationship between suffering and the everyday. It measures the distance between comfort and contingency. To “know” the blues, as Rushing frames it, is to have your feelings shaped by necessity, and to craft from that shaping a sound that tells the truth without apology.