You're standing on stage playing a song you wrote, "jamming" with your buddies, or just sitting in your room, playing out your emotions and you feel it, a feeling that is so harmonious, relaxing, exciting, and purifying that it can only begin to be explained by the word "awesome....

"It is America's music – born out of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between happy and sad, country and city; between black and white and men and women; between the Old Africa and the Old Europe – which could only have happened in an entirely new...