It’s oppressively hot here in NYC — a wonderful time to hide out in one’s frigidly air-conditioned igloo of an apartment. But kudos to the Providence Journal for today’s headline: “Steamy Monday, and Tuesday will be just as bad.” There’s something perfect in the headline’s appropriation of “Stormy Monday,” one of the greatest blues songs of all time, to describe the pitiless heat. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cold and snowy place that I see a rainless cast-iron sky in a hundred-degree heat wave as better than a thunderstorm, as a metaphor for love that won’t come back, and whose absence one fears will never stop hurting. (Here are versions of “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker, Bobby Bland, Albert King and John Mayall, and Buddy Guy. I wonder how many versions I could listen to, before finding one that does not cause my eyes to moisten, at least a little.) The old cliché called blues “the Devil’s music,” largely because the performers came out of a background of explicitly religious performance – hymns, Gospel, spirituals – and blues appeared profane in contrast. But in fact — because it faces so unflinchingly the truth about the life of fallen man, as basically a game in which the house always wins — blues has more right than most genres to the title “God’s music.” It states the problem in a stark manner that aches for an answer and sometimes even names that answer, but in an ambiguous combination of hope and despair (“Lord have mercy”); it is man’s Psalm 22, asking to be completed, and transfigured, by Psalm 23.