BLOGGING THE BLUES.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

In January 2012, I was hired for the formidable task of succeeding Steve Benen (and his predecessor Kevin Drum) as the chief writer for the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog. When I got on a conference call with Steve and my new boss, Paul Glastris, to discuss the transition and expectations, I was nervous but excited. The Monthly had been my favorite periodical for thirty years, and while I had seized the opportunity to contribute articles now and then, taking over the Animal was a whole new order of participation.

My mind was sort of wandering until Benen mentioned the daily quota of posts I would be expected to produce. He didn't just say twelve, did he? I thought. I knew Steve was a blogging machine, but still--twelve posts a day?

As Steve described his daily preparation for blogging, with a veritable breakfast buffet of reading to identify the political news of the day, I began to panic. I lived in California, you see, and I really did not want to have to wake up when Monterey's nocturnal raccoons were still sorting through the garbage cans. I determined that I would need some stratagem to buy time each morning to drink coffee, read, and think.

My expedient was a post called "Daylight Video": a music video, usually from YouTube, that kicked off each day at PA with something thought-provoking or entertaining. Often I went to "This Day in History" and found a musician's birthday or a tune-inspiring historical event to supply the pretext. The anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, for example, led me to Paul Robeson's moving performance of "John Brown's Body."

Sometimes the music videos were keyed to political news, as when I commented on a bellicose Mitt Romney foreign policy speech by posting a video of the punk band Fear performing "Let's Have a War." Occasionally the news called for something solemn. On the morning when we learned about the theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, I took down a Lou Reed video and put up a performance of a Kyrie Eleison--a collective "Lord Have Mercy"--from Mozart's Requiem to reflect our national complicity in lax gun regulation.

But sometimes, the music became an end in itself and not just a sidebar to politics. I often used my videos as a sort of mutual education in blues music whenever slow news enabled it, or when bluesy news demanded it. I would discover and then share blues old and new. Commenters suggested other artists and songs to enjoy. Gradually, the videos ballooned. My...