John Kessler

Kids used to have their own holiday. It was called Halloween. But now 50% of adults are celebrating Halloween, too. Giving up Halloween means admitting you're getting old, and no one wants to do that.

Here are some Halloween-ie tunes to help you get your spook on…

It may be the first musical instrument ever: 40,000 years ago one of our ancestors blew into an animal bone and made music.

But were they fluting or flauting? There seems to be confusion, so let’s settle this right now.

COULROPHOBIA. Fear of clowns. More common than you might think. We got a bad case of it after hearing all the nasty stuff people dressed like clowns are doing.

Besides selling hamburgers and squeezing into Volkswagens, clowns have been committing robberies and even murders…

Stevie Ray Vaughan almost single-handedly brought blues to the mainstream in the 1980’s and 90’s with over a dozen Billboard singles and four Grammy awards. He’ll always be considered one of the most original guitar players of all time.

Though musically untrained, he was an astute student of the blues, and much of what he popularized is built on the work of his fellow Texas bluesmen.

Scientifically crafted earworms, designed to make us buy things we didn’t even know we wanted, were invented in the early 1920’s. Since then, jingles have become an integral part of American culture.

And to think it all began with Wheaties …

“Crying the blues” perfectly describes the style of Sleepy John Estes. His music is not very complex, and he was a solid, but not a great guitarist.

Instead, Estes is known more for his ability to write about universal themes and to sing with deep emotion. He was a big influence on early bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy and Arthur Crudup. He also was a big inspiration for later players like Michael Bloomfield, with whom he worked in the 1960s.

“Drop Down Mama” is a song of his that has re-surfaced several times. Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon recorded it in 1935.

Just in time for fund drive we ponder some eternal questions about money.

Can money buy you love? No, but it puts you in better bargaining position. Can money buy you happiness? No again. But you can rent it for awhile.

We’re going postal on you this week. Songs about letters and mail abound, and no wonder, with over 570,000 workers, the US Postal Service is the second largest employer in the US, behind Wal-Mart.

Capable of at least 5000 expressions, the human face has inspired at least that many songs, and we listened to most of them ...

Being married is hard enough, but combine that with working together and you’ve got a tough proposition, so to speak.  It didn’t work out well for Ike and Tina Turner or for Sonny and Cher, but there are many musical couples who stayed together til the end.

It's a shame that the only thing a person can do for eight hours a day is work. Can't eat for eight hours; can't drink for eight hours; can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a person can do for eight hours is work.

So it makes sense that we would have a national holiday dedicated to work and working people, and an episode of iconic and quirky worky songs.

Music and working out seem to go together. But instead of working out this week we burn calories with a quick trip down the (short) memory lane of notable exercise music. (Please consult a physician before attempting any of these exercises. If you fracture your fundibula, we can’t be responsible.)

“Blues in the Night” first was heard in the 1941 movie “Hot Nocturne."

Written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, it’s considered to be a landmark in American popular music because it was one of the first times that rural black dialect and an explicitly bluesy melody was used in a popular song.

Things are so bad, a picture is now only worth 200 words. People are using the sun to get a tan. Everyone is downsizing — CEOs are even playing miniature golf.

Recession has us in depression, and we are certainly not going to let a good crisis go to waste, hence this week’s episode on songs about hard times ...

For the first "Blues Time Machine," I’ve chosen “Rollin’ and Tumblin’," a song that goes through some major changes on it’s way to the 21st century.

The story of "Rollin' and Tumblin'" also shows us that although the sound may evolve through time, the song remains true to the original.