Martin Scorsese's monumental enterprise, the six-volume film compilation The Blues, begins with a moving elegy by Scorsese himself, a film named 'Feel Like Going Home', which traces, a la John and Alan Lomax, the beginnings of the story of the blues, back in the Mississippi delta, and makes imaginative connections between the musical past and present of the land of the blues. Midway through the film, Willie Dixon, playing in a run-down bar, breaks into a song I haven't ever heard before. Dixon turns out to be an old man with two surviving teeth - as 'classically 'typical' a purveyor of the blues as ever lived! I don't know what I expected the man who wrote 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Spoonful' to look like - I guess surprise was unavoidable. But here are lines from the song he sang - another touch of the uncanny, another song which seems to have been written for the world we live in right now, though it wasn't.

now you talk about terror
what about poor me
i been terrorized
all my days
couldn't walk down the road
without somebody gonna stop by
want to pick on poor me

'You talk about terror'. You do, indeed. And poor Willie, who's probably been singing that song decades before you decided to bomb terror out of this world, knows you've been lying all along. In a sense the only genuine 'war on terror' the USA's ever seen, or probably is ever going to see, was the Civil Rights Movement. And this song speaks the terror that was confronted, and partly beaten back, by that.