Van Zandt wrote some of the saddest songs this side of Hank Williams, but the blues are not all about sad songs. There are plenty of "My baby left me" blues tunes out there, no doubt, but people did not flock to juke joints in the depression just to cry in their beer. They came to dance.

For professional singer Cynthia Rhys, studying music from movie musicals over the last century is an anthropological exercise. "We don't realize how much this art form has to do with us as an American culture," Rhys said in a phone interview this week from her home in Lenox, Mass. "What a powerful force of the American spirit music is for pulling people from all walks of life together."

So, it is Tuesday when I am writing this and you will be reading it on Thursday. By Thursday, we will probably be shelling Baghdad, and you might not remember what the world was like today.

Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt once said there were only two kinds of music, the blues and "Zip a Dee Doo Dah."