I heard a story on the radio the other day that was kind of interesting.

It seems that when MIck Jagger was starting out in music, his vocal style was a little too refined for a blues band.

An upper crust British accent just didn’t have the right authenticity when singing the earthy blues music that the band was trying to approximate.

Now, according to the story, Mick was pretty into sports.

During a rough basketball game, he bit off the tip of his tongue after colliding with another player.

And….swallowed it.

He didn’t speak for a week while his tongue healed….and when he did, his voice had changed.

Missing a bit of his tongue altered the way he sang, too.

Suddenly, he was able to sing the blues more closely to the way it should be sung.

Instant “almost authentic”…or, at least, closer to real than it was before.

No little white British boy is ever going to be an authentic bluesman….but the new result wasn’t as glaringly wrong as it had been before.

The point of the story was that we need to recognize that an accident can be an opportunity.

Instead of wallowing in self-pity, we need to look for ways to turn every situation to our advantage….to move on and make lemonade out of lemons.

That’s a pretty amazing bit of musical history….to think that a career could be made out of a collision on the basketball court.

I bit my tongue screwing around on a pogo stick when I was little.

Maybe I should sing the blues more often?

“it’s all over now” The Rolling Stones