"Call It Stormy Monday" is a blues so elemental it feels like weather. T-Bone Walker wrote it in 1947 as a catalogue of a week that refuses to get better. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday -- each day brings a new kind of trouble. He keeps walking through it because walking is what you do when the alternative is stopping. The blues has always understood that the worst days are not the ones you remember. They are the ones you survive.

Albert King recorded his version in 1966 and turned a weekly weather report into a testimony of endurance. Walker wrote the song as a working musician's complaint. King played it like a man who has been through so many stormy Mondays that the day of the week stopped mattering. The melody bends. The guitar cries. The same clouds keep passing overhead and the same man keeps standing under them.