Imagine you get a big, nasty sliver in your finger. The discomfort imprints your entire consciousness, becoming as absorbing to you as an asteroid stabbing the sky, scoring the panorama from horizon to horizon. And that... is just a goddamned sliver.

Now imagine slavery was in your own personal past, not to mention its effects still right up in your present (for those who have to imagine).

And think of how that would stick in your mind, straight in the center of your daily, astronomically emotional banality.

And think, that someone took those overwhelming thoughts and ordered their feelings about them into such a breeze of evocative poetry as this song, "Tennessee."

This is one of the best songs, and one of the all-time meditations.