As life gets more challenging and humans need to dig deep inside their souls to stay upward, music becomes the soundtrack for stability. It offers solace and shores up strength like nothing else. For me it's always been an audio inspiration that never fails, no matter how rough the circumstances or scarier the situation. Very often it is the only thing that makes sense, and fans the flames of faith when nothing else does. In so many ways, music is miraculous. Last year Neil Young told a New York Times reporter than when it's conveyed at its rightful sonic possibility, music "sounds like God." Exactly. Now are times when music's power can help fill our hearts with the very feelings needed to be our best. The beauty of that ability is it really doesn't matter what music it is. It's an equal opportunity savior, and always has been. God, whatever that may be, is like that.

gary ward

My earliest memory of hearing something that expanded my five-year-old mind was on the Galveston seawall in the summer 1955. My family would sometimes take a week-long vacation there from Houston, which was only an hour away, and spend the days on the beach and nights wandering around the seawall stores and pier, which also had a huge wooden rollercoaster that completely terrified me. One night there was an Afro-American man on the seawall beating on a 55-gallon oil drum, singing and whistling at full force. I saw him arrive at his spot at the seawall carrying his oil drum tied on the back fender of a snazzed-up bicycle with a huge antenna. No easy feat considering how big the oil drum was. He also wore an orange fez with a tassel on top. Pushing the visuals forward, he had spray-painted the drum with crazy swirls of fluorescent colors, and when he started playing he used mallets made with BBs inside. Now that alone was enough to throw me into a spin which was marked by weightlessness and immediate reverence. It was almost like a Martian had landed right in front of me that night.

gary ward

Then the man started singing, and sometimes barking, songs he had to have written himself. That were, uh, a little strange. He would sing into a tiny microphone he'd taped to his throat and then plugged into the biggest radio I'd ever seen. The only exact song I can remember had the chorus: "I just wish I knew how to sing / I'd go out and make a record and it'd be the best of everything." Yes! The musician was obviously a savant of some proportion. Life changed for me that night. Suddenly there were no rules that mattered anymore. The mid-1950s in Texas could feel pretty tied-down, even to a child, with the right side and the wrong side of the street clearly marked with not much leeway in-between. But this man, so beautifully named Bongo Joe, erased all that and showed my young mind that everything was possible. You could beat on an oil drum in public, wear an orange fez with a tassel that twirled when you played, sing whatever you wanted and make people happy and there wasn't a thing anyone could do about it. Now we're talking.

Freedom arrived that evening, right on time for me. Born in 1950 in Houston, I got hit by the wave of polio that was thundering across the nation then, mostly in the South. At the time it was the mother of all viruses, I've been told, and terrified the country like little else had. Life in the United States was rolling along with a spirited stride after winning World War II, and the population was ready to let the good times roll again. But for many polio threw fear into the mix, because no one knew what caused it or how to stop it. I drew the losing ticket and got it. Being so small I couldn't conceive what it was, but I knew what it did. My limbs shriveled up, and it was hard to breath. So when Bongo Joe knocked on my heart I heard the future. It had to be music, because anything else that took actual physical abilities weren't part of my own equation. Listening to him that first night, and every night after that I could be there, showed me a way out of the chains of disability. It felt like a huge door had been thrown open that only took a willing soul to enter. Music was the great equalizer. Hell, it was the only equalizer for me. I jumped in the deep end then with all I had, and have been there ever since. The twists through it all are a tale that still thrills me, making me ask how I found that musical road so early, and even with some threatening turns never got completely thrown off it. It has been the luck of a lifetime.

A year later when a song called "Hound Dog" blasted out of my mother's 1954 Plymouth car radio, I felt as if someone had plugged me into an electric socket like I was a toaster. Massive jolts of shivering tingles ran up my back and out my ears, almost like I was being electrocuted. I had no idea what it was, but I knew in an instant I had to chase it, find it and figure out a way to live with it forever. It was that instantaneous. Someone on The Today Show, Lord knows why I was watching it at six years old, talked about the song and Elvis Presley, the person who sang it. Even his name had an undeniable kick, and when I found out he was going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show in October I wrote myself a note to watch and see how this seeming extraterrestrial did it. Soon enough it was the fateful night and when the curtains parted and Elvis Presley raced out, he had this magical sneer on his face and shouted, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the time," it really did sound like God was speaking to me. The way Presley wiggled and wailed made me feel slightly afraid for his mental state. Surely something had invaded his body and taken over. No one could do this and live through it. But he did, over and over, and for the next few years he became my good luck charm to a better place. When I heard Elvis Presley's music everything made sense. When I didn't nothing made sense. I figured out quick I better keep listening and stay close to the heat.

But when the singer came out of the Army as the 1950s were ending, my invisible connection was gone. Presley didn't sound to me like he meant it as much, or at least the juice had been turned down. Here's where fate steps in and throws a slider. One night as our family drove to pick up my father at The Houston Post where he was the cartoonist, we sat in our car waiting for him on Dowling Street near the Post building, and right down Dowling there was a string of nightclubs that sounded like small neutron bombs were going off inside them. Occasionally a guitar player would walk out of the Ponderosa club's front door still playing, followed by his long black guitar chord. It was maximum blues, turned up to ten, and came like a Holy Roller church meeting was twanging at full tilt and the hallelujah chorus was shouting to save their souls. Then I noticed down the street a man sitting on the sidewalk in a chair playing an acoustic guitar and trying to sing over all the noise. He reared back and started shouting, "I'm smiling like I'm happy but you don't know how I feel / I feel like life is a cheater and it gave me a dirty deal…" 

Whoa! That song ripped my innards out and left them lying on the street. I was 10 years old, John Kennedy had just become president and things were looking up, but in junior high I had definitely fallen off the grid. The only thing I could actually do well was type, which didn't account for much, and because of my physical challenges I wasn't allowed to participate in P.E., but instead got stuck in a cage and had to hand out towels to the boys at the end of gym class. Towel Boy, that was my nickname then. I wanted to kill them all. I'd sit in the cage for an hour and wait for the rushing kids to come back in all jacked up from swinging on ropes or playing football and take a towel. And then when they were showered and dry, they'd throw the wet towels at me like I was a human target, a sitting duck in the cage. But I remembered that song from Dowling Street and swore I'd find the man who sang it. I remembered how he had a harmonica in a rack around his neck that he he'd blow in when he was playing, and a two-cymbal contraption he'd smash down with his left foot so you could always feel the beat.

One morning I struck up a conversation with the trash collector on our street, and for some reason asked him if he'd ever seen anyone like that. I kind of felt he knew about blues. He told me yes, the singer's name was Juke Boy and he hung out on Lyons Avenue in the Fifth Ward. That neighborhood was nicknamed "the Bloody Fifth" by the police for its history of heavy violence, and the trash collector told me to be careful if I went there. One Saturday afternoon I lied to my parents and told them I was going downtown to the movies. I had to, because I needed to find the singer from Dowling Street. He had secrets I had to learn. I figured out the buses to get to the Fifth Ward and went off looking for Juke Boy. How could anyone resist a name like that? 

And when I got to Lyons there he was, like a sparkling vision I had conjured up. The man was blasting out harmonica lines for all he was worth and singing like his life depended on it, which it probably did. He had a cigar box in front of him for listeners to toss coins in, and it looked semi-full by the time I got there. I stood on the corner, watching Juke Boy pour his heart out on an unbelievably hot Houston street, going from songs like "Sad, Sad Sound," "Struggle Here in Houston" and "Stay Off Lyons Avenue" for the next hour. I was hypnotized by it all: the sound, the action, the people, the razor's edge in the air, but most of all, as the painted letters said on his guitar case: JUKE BOY BONNER ONE-MAN BAND. There was something that filled me so full that I immediately knew I had found my center. This was where all my uncertainties melted away and a new day dawned. For me, the blues songs Bonner was singing had a way of taking away the feelings of being lacking in life, like the songs were sponges that absorbed all the shame of being less than others, and replaced it with a bursting joy and key to a new kingdom. I knew it right away too, just like 60 years later I know it now. The blues is the happiest music on earth, because it replaces sadness as surely as breathing itself. Watching this man sit in a chair, strum a guitar, blow a harmonica, play a hi-hat and sing songs that unlocked a wide world of gorgeous generosity and eternal hope took me out of myself and into the place I always yearned to be. What else is there, really? It shook me from the top of my head to the soles of my feet and offered the ultimate gift: it gave me me. I still thank Juke Boy Bonner silently every day, and gave my second son the middle name Bonner as a token of deep appreciation for what he taught me. I was flying then. I'd go to school with Juke Boy Bonner records, and soon started listening to his cousin Lightnin' Hopkins. Looking back, it was clear I wore them like a badge, something that acknowledged being different, and found a passionate pride in it. The other kids could have football, baseball, swimming, track, whatever. I had blues, and nothing else could touch me. It was like a magical potion which trumped all else, at least for me. After that I took another step into a wilder world of music that showed a whole other side of thrills I couldn't even imagine. I've never seen anything like it, as much as I've tried.

In 1963 I bought an album by James Brown called LIVE AT THE APOLLO. It took the top of my head off from first listen, a non-stop rush of 100-mile-per-hour barn-burning songs mixed with ballads of such overwhelming tenderness it was like time stopped over and over. Brown recorded the album on his own dime, it turned out, after the president of King Records told him no go, that live albums didn't sell. That the album would stay on the best-seller charts for two years was a revelation surely not lost on Brown or King Records' prez. One listen to the Apollo album and the skies parted. When I found out James Brown and his entire revue were coming to the Paladium Ballroom I quickly snapped that I had to go. I was only 13, but age didn't matter. I was called. Fortunately my older brother Bob and his buddies were going, and I tagged along. There was simply no way I would not; I had to be there. Walking into the Paladium that night, only a year after the live Apollo album was recorded and one month before President Kennedy would be assassinated, there was a crushing current that ran through the audience. America was starting to experience some of the first evidence of change for the African-American community. There was promise in the air. It was a long way from real change, but the possibility was exciting. And James Brown was the new musical Messiah. He walked with a different step than so many R&B singers then, like he owned his own future and would be deterred by no one.

Even in 1963 to a young teenager, it felt very different. After a few opening singers and a short set by the 12-piece orchestra, M.C. Danny Ray came out to introduce Brown with what has to be the most mesmerizing litany of hits ever announced onstage. And when at the end he simply says, "Ladies and gentlemen, the hardest working man in show business, James Brown and the Famous Flames," the entire room of 500 people exploded together. What they were witnessing before them was like a vision: James Brown sprinting on stage, and immediately dancing across its entire length and back--on one leg! Physical reality had been suspended and this short dynamo of untamable energy was defying the possible and replacing it with the unreal. The entire night was like that. Brown would be up in the air and then down on his knees, screaming and pleading and testifying and showing his followers the yellow brick road to the promised land. The James Brown show in the early 1960s is a performance that really does reside in a place beyond mere words. I have tried to tell the uninitiated what happened at his shows then--how the band played as one monstrous engine, how the Famous Flames provided gorgeous backing vocals and exquisite precision dancing, how Brown himself went beyond human abilities with jaw-dropping physical feats and songs that made the head snap back and the heart burst open--but the words don't come close to that life-changing and mind-blowing show.

James Brown, like Bongo Joe, Elvis Presley and Juke Boy Bonner,  pulled back the curtains on what my small existence was going to be, and gave me the belief about how I could be something besides someone on the sidelines. I knew I would not survive there. I had dreams of more, and could not accept the corner I'd been assigned to stay in. For many years I misbehaved out of desperation that I was going to be left behind because of my so-called shortcomings. I wanted to get in the middle of the excitement, and music offered me its hand, the only hand I could find. It graciously let me in, and said, "All are welcome here. Just believe in what you see and hear and find a life that reflects that beauty to others." And that is what we are all being called to do in today's mystifying world. We don't know what is happening, or how it will turn out. Maybe we never really did, but when massive questions cannot be answered is when fear steps in and struggles for the wheel. Right behind fear are miscalculations and mistakes. But hearing the sounds of music is to hear a higher voice calling us. And when those sounds are truly heard, the way they are meant to be heard, they sound like God.

Bill Bentley