Throughout the past 40 years, America has been increasingly divided by fighting a cultural war with itself and by the media carving up the country into "red" and "blue" states that apparently have little in common. Endless battles have erupted over gay marriage, immigration, abortion, gays in the military, religion, the role of government in individual lives, and other so-called "wedge issues." They've certainly driven a wedge into the heart of our nation, if not a stake. This new civil war has been waged over the most personal issues we all confront, and the U.S. has seemed determined to tear itself asunder because it couldn't find the empathy or the soul to grant a piece of privacy and dignity to every one of its citizens. It's been a recipe for constant sorrow.

Yet those who can't agree on anything else have often found themselves standing next to "the enemy" and having a magnificent time at a musical event -- a bluegrass festivals, a blues concert, a rock show or other, similar venues. It's as if the music itself has been trying to bring together and heal what politics, religion, and petty quarreling have split apart; as if those twelve notes of our musical scale are trying to reach us and tell us that we're better than this and have found solutions to larger and deeper problems during our past two-plus centuries as a nation. As if they're trying to remind us of how explosively creative we are and of what we can still become. Walt Whitman had once heard America signing, but if he were alive now and listening, he'd have heard it picking and strumming too.

            Since the mid-1960s, the country had appeared increasingly dysfunctional on many levels, but the opposite was true of its music. The amount, the variety, and the quality of sounds the U.S. had produced during the past four or five decades has been astonishing, yet one has to dig below Top 40 radio and the Grammy Awards to appreciate this. As with so many other things in American life, music had fragmented, but virtually every fragment had generated new masters of their genre and of their instruments, from the mandolin to the violin to the harmonica. Not just in the U.S., but around the globe players have risen to extreme accomplishments, compared to the recent past. Gypsy jazz guitarists in Europe, like Stochelo Rosenberg and Jimmy Rosenberg, have taken Django Reinhardt's luminous talent and expanded it well beyond him. The same is true among bluegrass pickers, banjoists, and blues guitarists. On the Internet you can now watch teenagers sit in their bedrooms and teach you how to play just like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck.

            I'd once believed that when historians looked back on America in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, they'd praise our scientists and engineers, who'd driven forward so many technological breakthroughs, invented countless mechanical devices, and taken us to the moon. Or they'd honor the civil rights activists who'd struggled to provide equality under the law and equal opportunities for everyone. But I'd like to plug the musicians, who have filled a different but vitally important role in our lives -- teaching us through their hands and voices that we have more far in common with each other than not, and that we ignore this at our peril.