I started the process of voting on my 2012 Blues Music Awards ballot tonight. I say “started”, because this process invariably becomes a long running endeavor, fraught with a wide range of emotions, from righteous indignation to raging self-doubt.

I know it will go on like this for a month or two then I’ll just let it all go, cast my ballots for the prettiest ones and not think about it again.  By the time it rolls around to May, when I’m sitting in the Memphis Convention Center gnawing on a flavorless piece of chicken, I’ll be trying to remember, “Which acoustic album did I vote for?”

I try to take the process seriously. I think the Blues Foundation is a good organization, dedicated to good things and the awards are its way of honoring “the family”, so to speak. However, like any awards for anything artistic, I also have great reservations.

Take the Grammy Awards, for instance. Or better yet, don’t. I watch the broadcast about every four years and then just feel sad that four hours of my life were so casually thrown into the garbage to elevate the profit margin of people who hate music so much that they feel the need to flog it in the modern day public square of primetime.

Country music has a different award show on television every couple of months and the gleaming white spokes model/stars and airbrushed outlaws smartly gush over “the fans who make this all possible.”

No one is ever going to win American Idol singing Howlin’ Wolf songs. Buddy Guy isn’t going to be hosting Saturday Night Live any time soon. Tommy Castro will not be lip-syncing the Thanksgiving Halftime Show at Cowboys Stadium surrounded by the Up with People dancers. The Blues Music Awards will never be on network television and no matter what Chefjimi wears, there won’t be a “red carpet preview!” The people on this ballot are my equals, my peers, and my friends. They tour in vans and station wagons, not busses and jets, playing one night stands and staying in cheap hotels. They deserve this kind of accolade.

I understand how easy it is to stand outside something like this and criticize it. I see it all the time, sometimes people feel their friends have been ignored, often people try to make it a racial thing. As with any popularity contest people can feel disenfranchised. What I say to those people is this. It is only marginally more difficult to join the Blues Foundation and have a voice in the process than it is to sit outside it and piss and moan.

It’s far from perfect. This year, I see some glaring omissions from the Album of the Year and Gibson Guitarist Award, but those are personal. And…you know what? This isn’t very comfortable to admit, but there’s a little voice in my head that wishes I had gotten a nomination. That voice looks at the list and says of nominated bass players (all fantastic players by the way) and says “You played more gigs and logged more miles than all those guys.” I tell the voice to keep it down. Do the work. Worship the groove, not the gold.