If as a child you are wrapped in a burlap sack and smoked over a fire, as Jesse Fuller is said to have been, or tied up in a little ball and kicked around the house, to cite a well-documented Puritan disciplinary technique—or only beaten regularly with a switch, or orphaned and starved, or made fun of because you're poor and your teeth are bad and your eyes are crossed—someone who in some way has suffered like you will hear it in your voice, see it in the arcing of your fiddle bow and your 88-key grin, smell it in your love of whiskey and good times. And they will want to get to know you. They... More >>>