I CAN’T HIT THE PAGE without hearing Hendrix, his psychedelically bluesed guitar journeys I bathed in for at least an hour every day for four or five years of my early twenties until I’d memorized every solo, him fingering feedback and folding wah wah into sonic ambulances of soul. I can’t hit the page without the echo of Muddy Waters’s Mississippi guitar that found its way to an electrified Chicago, without hearing the “I’m a Man” foundational blocks with his legendary harmonica men—Little Walter, Carey Bell, James Cotton, Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton, George Smith. I hear their tremolo and bravado, the shuffles, train tracks and galactic howls seeping from their mouths through reeds and between their fingers, and I ache to bring it to the page—I bleed to breathe it into stanzas. I can’t hit the page without Yusef Lateef and John Lee Hooker and Curtis Mayfield blazing across the chorus. I can’t hit the page without Prince on stage at the Super Bowl strutting in the rain, singing his signature into the far-off lightning. I can’t hit the page without Al Green’s falsetto grinding against his acoustic guitar, making the angels grit their teeth with jealousy. I can’t hit the page without Coltrane walking the bar with his horn, scraping the blues into abstraction from beneath a heated spoon. I can’t hit the page without Art Tatum’s cataracted cosmic vision burning up the eighty-eights with blinding speed. I can’t hit the page without Mingus and Diz and Marley and Fred McDowell and Howlin’ Wolf whisper-growling in my ear to know their names with mine.