Muddy Waters once said, "The blues had a baby, and they named it rock 'n' roll." While wrinkles and infantile behavior pertaining to rock music conjures more images of Keith Richards than newborns, the bluesman's metaphor is nonetheless very clear. Our popular music of today - like all art - owes a great debt to its predecessors, which have taken the discipline to realms unseen and paved the way for modern contributions. For me, the heart and soul of rock is indisputably made manifest in the blues.

I came across my first real blues tracks as a Vanderbilt freshman, when I started to wonder where Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan got so many of their ideas. It's no secret that these men and their colleagues developed egos larger than their Marshall stacks as they were rocketed into stardom in the 1960s; what never changed, though, was their deep reverence for a handful of struggling and largely unacknowledged blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta. What had begun as an enormously popular genre in the Prohibition era had faded into obscurity in the wake of a vinyl shortage during World War II. By the time the blues were rediscovered and artists had begun incorporating blues elements into their own music, many of its original practitioners had died or disappeared.

Their scratchy and monophonic recordings remain, however. I remember the first time I fired up Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen"; the eerie falsetto of his voice rang in my ears like some cacophonous moan, and I was forced to shut it off hastily as my pulse quickened and the hairs bristled on the back of my neck. Same story for Blind Willie Johnson, Son House and quite a few others. The music was not unmelodious, but rather incomparably different, like a strange culinary delicacy. In time, I was able to get used to the tracks and listen to them in their entirety, learning to enjoy both the rapid-fire fingerpicking and undulating "work song" vocals filled with melancholy and pathos. Most of the surviving songs are solo efforts without percussion or a backup band, and they certainly are not high-energy party music; they only feature a man - or, often times, a woman - pouring his heart out into twelve bars, singing of lovers and loneliness in the most economical and candid of lyric verses. The album was a foreign concept to these singers; each track functions as its own unit, a work of art that stands on its own with all its raw imperfections and striking authenticity. When I had learned to understand this, I realized that my eyes had been opened to a whole new world, and the way I listened to music was changed forever.

The blues was not the only music to make its mark upon the industry; folk, bluegrass, country and many others have all influenced, to some degree, the tunes we enjoy today. With that in mind as you peruse the Versus Music section in the coming weeks, be sure to keep an eye out for music that you find fresh and interesting, be it old or modern. You never know what you might discover.