QUEEN ESTHER'S BATTLE CRY
- By Alan Richard
- 20 hours ago
- 23 min read
A CONVERSATION ON 'BLACKBIRDING,' HER STUNNING NEW RECORD
The fearless, enthralling new album from Queen Esther centers on the American Civil War, a peculiar choice even for one of the most distinctive Black artists in roots music. You likely haven‘t heard anything quite like Blackbirding.
Released digitally on Feb. 6, the album could be labeled country-soul. In truth, the songs range from rustic gospel blues to galloping honky-tonk, gorgeous soul-shaking ballads, and 1970s-era rock ‘n roll.
You know. American music.
What elevates Blackbirding from remarkable to transcendent is Queen Esther as the Southern Black feminist narrator. She began writing most of the album during a residency in February 2020 at Gettysburg National Military Park, through the National Park Service and the National Parks Arts Foundation, that allowed her to stay on the battlefield in a house built in the 1850s. Then she moved from one battlefield to another, returning to her home in New York City as the pandemic shutdown began. There were long lines and empty shelves at grocery stores, people living in fear and dying alone, and an eerie solitude descending on the city.
Settling in Harlem upon her arrival in New York City as an ex-pat undergrad from the University of Texas at Austin, Queen Esther grew up in Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, respectively — cities rooted in Black history, African folklore, tradition, and music. As an artist, she has has always asked why things are the way they are in America, perpetually unraveling the racism that consistently emerges as the main thread that binds this country’s past, present, and future.
Her original songs on Blackbirding, along with two haunting spirituals and a couple of beguiling rock cover songs to reveal a Black American perspective — more importantly, a Southern Black woman’s perspective — on America’s bloodiest battle, its unfathomable cost, the memory and myths that followed, and how they speak to our journey today. To make sure the album’s message is understood, she created a listener’s guide, available to download via Bandcamp.
It was on the Gettysburg battlefield that Queen Esther discovered slavery never ended. It evolved. The Civil War didn’t end either, becoming a cold war filled with propaganda that has warped the American psyche thanks to the Lost Cause narrative and normalized racism. As we can see from the ICE agents murdering, brutalizing, and kidnapping our fellow citizens and the concentration camps built to house the detainees, blackbirding — the 19th century practice of disappearing free Black folk and selling them into slavery — is evolving, too. Queen Esther believes that until slavery, the Civil War and blackbirding truly come to an end, America will never truly be America.
Listening to Blackbirding, I’ve begun to agree.
The album’s first single, Hold Steady, set to a 1960s pop-and-R&B beat and pounding acoustic bass, is a rally cry for seekers of justice. Queen Esther urgently implores us to work for justice and freedom with the speed and determination of soldiers at battle.
She’s also speaking to Black people and others who’ve been forced, now and throughout this country’s history, to defend themselves at nearly every moment of their lives:
You got to take it right on the chin
Where you end up is where you begin
If you stop now, you know you’re never gonna win
You think you’re gaining ground
And then you’re losing again
Hold steady
Hold steady
Hold steady…
(Photo in the video by Whitney Browne)
Unapologetically placing blame where it belongs for the war and its aftermath — from the hard treatment of Black residents even in Gettysburg to Jim Crow and today’s military-style attacks on immigrants and protesters, and the startling rise in racist and homophobic rhetoric and violence — Queen Esther’s songs speak to the Black experience and the humanity of the souls who died or witnessed the horrors at Gettysburg.
Through the songs on Blackbirding, their intense lyrics adorned by wonderful melodies that stay with you, she illuminates a path that can lead to reclamation and reconciliation. We simply need to muster the courage to follow.
In Home Free, for instance, Queen Esther warns, “No, we can’t see all the good that’s bound to happen, ’cause fixing what’s wrong is up to you.”
She’s joined on the album by impressive New York-area musicians, including Jeff McLaughlin on electric and acoustic guitars, Raphael McGregor on pedal and lap steel, veteran jazz bassist Hilliard Green, Sharp Radway on piano, singer Kat Edmondson, and others.
Queen Esther will perform an album release concert on March 21 at New York City’s venerated performance space Joe’s Pub, following a Feb. 2 show at Lucinda’s in New York (where she recently met and hung out with Lucinda Williams herself).
As a close friend, Queen Esther and I have been in conversation about this album for months. Here’s some of what we discussed recently, followed by links to the songs.
Q&A:
This is such a fascinating project and inspired framing of these topics. You can feel the power of your experience in Gettysburg and how it resonates right now.
Thank you so much. As a songwriter and as a vocalist, I poured myself and so much of what I saw and felt and found on the Gettysburg battlefield into these songs. And as a producer, I moved heaven and earth to make sure that the songs I heard in my head sound like the songs on this album.
As a creative and a Black feminist, what drew you to the Gettysburg battlefield?
I’m from the Deep South and I’m two generations removed from slavery, so as far as I’m concerned, I’ve always been on that battlefield. The truth is, every American is out there in the midst of the fray. Because the Civil War is still going on. That Jan. 6 riot at the capitol in Washington, D.C. was a continuation of that conflict. Those rioters and anyone that thinks the way they do are their descendants. We are all caught up in all of that unfinished business, whether we realize it or not.
What part of the South are you from?
I was raised in Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, cities steeped in Blackness, in Black history and purpose and intent. Both of my parents are from South Carolina’s Lowcountry. All of this Blackness, it’s in the air. It's our culture, our birthright. Everyone gets a heavy dose of this Blackness when they go to these cities, whether they’re Black or not. Because Southern culture is Black culture, quiet as it’s kept. And really, that’s because American culture is Black culture. The food you’re eating, the slang you’re using, all that music you love so much. That banjo you’re playing. All of American popular music is rooted in this Blackness that’s radiating from the South like the sun itself. It’s tangled up in so many African sonic and folk traditions that go back thousands of years. The further south you go, the Blacker it gets. You can ignore it in other parts of the country. Not the South. Not by a long shot. Everything that anyone loves about America is because of Black people. I’m not even going to get into all of the things that Black people have invented — or the intellectual theft that went on for hundreds of years while we were enslaved, because the law said an enslaved person’s intellectual property belonged to you, if you owned that person. It’s been like this ever since we got here: Black people make, Black people create, Black people invent and innovate, America takes. And so does the rest of the world.
Still, you’ve always focused on Blackness.
It wasn’t necessarily on purpose. I was always asking why, what happened, who did this, why are things this way. I was that kid. And inevitably, the answers led back to Blackness. That’s true in the rest of the world, too. Especially South America and Central America. More enslaved Africans were brought to Mexico and Peru than America. Most people don’t know that. If they had the one-drop rule in every country in the Americas, just about everyone would be Black. In the meantime, they’re hiding in plain sight. And so is their Black history.
If I’m an oil geyser that’s ever erupting, with all of this music and ideas and everything else, my mother is definitely the one who lit the match, because she taught me how to read when I was three years old. My giftedness was assessed and I was placed in the gifted program when I was five. I grew up knowing about the Civil War and slavery because I read about it.
I knew that the Battle of Gettysburg was a pivotal moment in the Civil War, but I didn’t know why or how. I thought that if I went there, if I explored the battlefield, talked to historians, did a deep dive and researched that battle in different directions with all of that Blackness in mind, the historical truths that would explain how we got here would rise to the surface. And they did.
What kinds of things did you learn?
I’ll give you a great example of how far down the rabbit hole I went with one strand of information. In 1860, it was illegal for enslaved Black people to own property, because according to the Supreme Court, they were considered property, and property can’t own property. Free Black folk could own property, but there was an avalanche of restrictions that varied from state to state to prevent that from happening. The Homestead Act of 1862 was a federal law that basically said if you’re an adult U.S. citizen or if you’re an adult and you’re going to be a U.S. citizen in the near future, and if you’ve never taken up arms against the U.S. government, you can claim 160 acres of surveyed public land. And yes, that included the white women. Not the married white women, because they weren’t considered the head of the household. Everybody else, though. Divorced, single, widowed. Abandoned. If somebody could live on that land and stick to it and improve it in five years, the government would let them have it for a very small fee. Remember that Black people weren’t considered U.S. citizens until 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. We weren’t allowed all rights until The Civil Rights Act of 1964 — you know, the one that they’re actively trying to dismantle right now.
What’s the kicker?
Black people could own property in Pennsylvania, in Gettysburg. Black people could own farmland there. I didn’t know that.
How did you begin to think about Blackness and the actual Battle of Gettysburg itself?
Pickett’s Charge, a major part of the Battle of Gettysburg, was the biggest defeat that the South suffered up to that point. This battle was the first time the South didn’t have the home court advantage. The legendary defeat at Pickett’s Charge was the moment when it finally dawned on white Southerners that they might not win this thing. Historians say this massive loss is the moment the Confederacy died. What they’re not telling you is that this happened on a free Black man’s property. His name was Abraham Bryan. Everyone should know who he is. Think about that. The Confederacy died on a free Black man’s property. There’s no American history textbook that would ever print that. The South would not allow it.
Had you studied much about the Civil War before you created this song cycle?
You grew up in South Carolina, so you know how they’d take you on school outings and whatnot to these Civil War memorials.
Growing up in a rural community near Greenville, South Carolina, I remember that we had school field trips to nearby Clemson University to tour the John C. Calhoun mansion. He was a vice president, secretary of state and longtime U.S. senator who championed states rights and slavery. I didn’t realize until later how bizarre it was to show such reverence for this man. How did you begin to reckon with some of these realities as you grew up?
I had a library card when I was five years old. By then, I could read as well as kids who were more than twice my age. I was a lost cause, pardon the pun. I loved history. Whenever I went anywhere, I wanted to know what happened there. And then I wanted to read about it. As a child, I loved visiting Charles Towne Landing, the site of the first English settlement in that area. I remember a school field trip to Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, when I was in the fifth grade. We took a little trolley train all the way to the top of the mountain and walked around and took in the view, which was spectacular. The Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross up there, near where we were, the night before. I was the only one who asked: Who burned what up here, and why? I was always asking questions. And if no one gave me the answers, I went to the library and kept digging until I found them.
Did you research Stone Mountain after that experience?
Yes, absolutely. Gutzon Borglum was the sculptor responsible for Stone Mountain. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but it’s the largest bas-relief artwork in the world. It’s that cross-dressing Confederate President Jefferson Davis and generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and they’re all on horseback. They turned the area around this mountain into a park and opened it exactly one year to the day of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Can you believe that? And that ain’t all. Mount Rushmore, that’s Gutzon Borglum, too. The kicker is that he was a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard! He denied it to the press because he was a famous, critically acclaimed sculptor, but everybody knew it. He was close friends with D.C. Stephenson, the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon of the Illinois chapter who was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer in 1925. Stephenson’s conviction brought down the Klan in the Midwest. For a little while, anyway.
Maybe we can come back to that one. I learned later that Gutzon Borglum’s parents were Danish immigrants. They were also Mormons and polygamists, which was easy to pull off in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, I guess. Borglum’s father was married to his mother and his mother’s sister. Did all of them speak Danish? Of course. We never hear about it because those immigrants don’t believe immigration issues have anything to do with them, then or now. There’s way too many Europeans who got here illegally. There’s way too many Europeans who are here illegally now. ICE isn’t coming after any of them. There’s a reason for that.
Fascinating. So let’s get back to Gettysburg.
Yes. There’s an area on the battlefield called Confederate Row with statues from 12 Southern states to honor their fallen soldiers. Gutzon Borglum sculpted the North Carolina statue. And yes, it’s beautiful. When I saw his name in the description of his KKK rank and affiliations, I remembered being on top of Stone Mountain, the smell of smoke from that cross burning, the way the teachers looked at me when I asked them what happened there. When I insisted that they tell me the truth. All of it came rushing back. I wondered how many Black people he had murdered, him and the rest of the Grand Dragons all over the country. The enormity of it all, the reality of it all, it hit me all at once. I’d always felt driven to finish this project, but after I saw that Gutzon Borglum sculpture, everything in me was drenched with rocket fuel. I knew that I wanted this album to be a matchbook. And I wanted each of the songs on this album to be a match. Just like my mother set me on fire intellectually when she taught me how to read. As I left Confederate Row that day, the last stanza from that poem Flame Of God was running through my head over and over and over:
Give me the love that leads the way,
The faith that nothing can dismay
The hope no disappointments tire,
The passion that will burn like fire;
Let me not sink to be a clod;
Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.
So, to answer your question, yes. Before I wrote this song cycle, I studied quite a bit about the Civil War.
One theme that’s present throughout your album is the notion of gaining ground, then losing it, over and over. Triumph and surrender. Claim and loss. Then reclamation.
Does this idea reflect the bit of progress that we saw a few years ago, with the election of President Obama and the nationwide protests over police violence, then the regression we’re witnessing today?
Well, sure. The songs are about what happened on the battlefield, that progress and regression, the constant winning and the losing and the flags going back and forth for either side. At the same time, the songs are about what’s happening right now. I’m summing up the arc of American history from a Black perspective. You want to see the real America? Look at the history of Black people and the Indigenous people of this country. We make progress, then we undo the progress we just made, then we get stuck and unstuck, then we make progress and undo it, and on and on. Too many people in America are still boiling, lava-hot mad that Obama was president for eight years. They’re mad that he did a great job. So now they’ve elected people to undo all that good, even though it means undoing good things for them, too. Seriously, how can you say you’re the land of the free and enslave millions of human beings? And because slavery was so lucrative, it created the financial bedrock that built America. Who was gonna stop that money train?
That’s why the Civil War was fought. Slavery. The Confederate states seceded from the Union because they wanted to protect their right to own slaves and wanted to keep slavery going in new territories like Kansas and Missouri. That’s what got that party started. “You wanna cave in my beautiful economy and my beautiful way of life by taking away my beautiful legal right to own Black people? I’m outta here!”
Did you ever take a class trip to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor?
As a child I visited Fort Sumter with my mother, I believe.
That’s where the party really started. The South literally threw the first punch. When it was all over, the Daughters of the Confederacy created the Lost Cause narrative so they could garner sympathy, play the victim, and rewrite history.
It was a cold war.
Yes, exactly. So far, they’ve been successful with all that “we’re the real victims of the war, we were beset upon by the North while we were sipping mint juleps in hoop skirts and Southern gentlemen were squiring us around our lush pastoral grounds, and oh yes, we were taking real good care of the happy colored folk” propaganda. Everybody believed them and let them write the textbooks and build those myths until it became the story itself. And that’s how we got here.
Why do you say that slavery never ended?
Because it hasn’t. Ever heard of the 13th Amendment? Except. That’s what it says. Except. Slavery is over, except. It literally says neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except for a punishment for a crime. Oh look, the prison industrial complex has entered the chat. And so has all the detainment centers they’re building. Because now that homelessness and poverty and being the wrong kind of immigrants are being criminalized, and, now that it’s going to happen to everyone else and not just Black people, maybe the fact that slavery has never ended will be way more obvious.
Ava DuVernay did a brilliant documentary about this called 13th, right? I’ve also read Doug Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, about Black prisoners forced into hard labor in the mines of Alabama, many of them for far longer than their original sentences for minor offenses.
Prison labor has been an invisible workforce in this country ever since Black people stopped working for free. It still is because that 13th Amendment loophole was never amended. What does that loophole mean? It means that if you are a prisoner, you are a slave. They couldn’t have rebuilt the South without that invisible workforce. Some of those penitentiaries in the South used to be plantations, you know. They’ve got those convicts doing everything from picking cotton and harvesting turnips to frying chicken at Popeyes. They earn pennies per hour, if they get paid at all. A lot of them are in there on trumped up charges, pardon the pun, or things like marijuana possession. You’d get 20 years of hard labor for jaywalking. And if they refuse to go pick okra or whatever, they could be denied parole, they could be put in solitary confinement. They’d get beat down, tortured. Murdered.
As it turns out, crime is down nationwide. According to the FBI, it’s been falling steadily for more than 30 years. Car theft, violent crime, murder, all of it. It’s a total downward trend. In 2025, homicides were down in Baltimore by more than 60%, thanks to their young, genius Black mayor Brandon Scott, which is probably why Trump isn’t talking about him anymore. If he did, everyone would know about what Mr. Scott has done to turn the city around, and that goes against the narrative that Trump believes about Black people. Or the mayor of Chicago. Lots of Black success stories out there these days.. Facts get in the way of all the fearmongering. Especially on the news. When prisoners aren’t getting murdered, committing suicide, or dying of COVID or some illness like cancer or heart diseases, the inmates are growing old and passing away. And they’re not getting replaced in greater numbers than they’re dying off because crime is down.
So where are they going to get reinforcements for that invisible workforce? I’ll tell you where. Detention centers. They’re already working the detainees while they’re in lockdown. It's why they’re criminalizing the homeless, the poor, the disenfranchised, the mentally unstable. Like I said, slavery has never ended. And what does any of that have to do with Gettysburg?
You beat me to it!
This is where the rubber hits the road. Blackbirding is 18th century slang for the kidnapping of fugitive and free Black folk and selling them off into slavery. That’s what happened in the movie Twelve Years A Slave. Historians have referred to blackbirding as the Reverse Underground Railroad because they sold as many Black people as Harriet Tubman freed. Probably more. The white guys who ran around doing this stuff were called blackbirders. It was pretty lucrative, too. You could make anywhere from $9,000 to $15,000 per Black person, in today’s money. Those people in those detention centers? They got blackbirded. The Black men who’ve spent decades in prison for a misdemeanor, out here on a chain gang, picking up garbage on the highway? They got blackbirded. People that are getting locked up because they’re poor and they can’t make bail, like Kalief Browder.
Who is Kalief Browder?
Kalief Browder was arrested at 16 because someone accused him of stealing their backpack, so the police threw him in Rikers. He refused to accept a plea bargain because he didn’t want to plead guilty for something he didn’t do. His family didn’t have money for bail, so he sat in Rikers for three years without anyone charging him for anything. He was physically assaulted. He was sexually assaulted. And most of that time was spent in solitary confinement. Two years after he was released, he went to his parents house and committed suicide. They took his freedom out of the clear blue sky, just like that. If that’s not 21st century blackbirding, then I don’t know what is.
You know, General Robert E. Lee encouraged his soldiers to go blackbirding while they were in Gettysburg. That’s why Black folk abandoned their property when they knew he was gonna show up. They were referred to as contraband — not free, not a slave. War property. Those Confederate soldiers roped off those Black folks that they could find like they were cattle and dragged them through the main street, right in front of their white neighbors. I’m talking about free Black people. Free. A lot of them had never been enslaved. No one knows what happened to most of them. In the same way, we don’t know what happened to all the Black folk who’ve gotten stuck in that 13th Amendment loophole. And are still getting stuck in it, along with everyone else they don’t like.
Thank you for sharing all of this history and insight. We should talk about each of the songs on the new album. Below, see SoulCountry’s brief thoughts on each track, links to each song, and Queen Esther’s comments:
The leadoff track takes you right to the violence of the battlefield, draped in blood and irony.
This is about the unsung heroines of the battlefield. They were uniformed military women that existed on both sides of the conflict who sold wine to soldiers in the midst of battle, and sometimes gave them medical care in the worst of circumstances. The ending reflects what’s happening on the battlefield, which is loud and chaotic and confusing and all over the place. I also wanted the listener to meditate on what it means to be thirsty. If you’re Black, you’re hearing something else entirely. Because when we say that someone is thirsty, it takes on a whole new meaning. For hundreds of years, it was illegal for more than two enslaved Africans to talk to each other. We had to use words and phrases that meant something else so that we could talk freely in front of white people and they wouldn’t know what we were saying to each other. It’s still that way for a reason.
Queen Esther begins this century-old spiritual as a soft blues-shuffle, taking the song back from a white preacher who falsely claimed it, and ultimately triumphing over death.
I chose this standard for the album with Lincoln Cemetery in mind. Even in death, there was segregation in America. The history of this song also reflects our American story of appropriation, along with my own roots in the church. Just like country music and rock music, it’s a Black spiritual. However, the song was claimed by Brother Claude Ely, a white preacher in Virginia. Let’s be clear. He stole it. The same song, C’ain’t No Grave, the same one that Sister Rosetta Tharpe rocked out on in the late 1940s, appeared in a 1933 hymnal for the Church of God in Christ, a Black denomination with deep ties to song. When you’re Black and the oral traditions being what they are, you build on what came before. That’s clearly visible in the blues and gospel traditions. That’s jazz. That’s everything. That is like the foundation of all. You just take the song? You’re not supposed to do that.
Another reason for recording that song and making it the second track on Blackbirding is because I learned… (that) even on the Union side, Black residents’ graves were later moved for a housing development, and that Black troops were denied burial alongside their fellow soldiers. These real events in history, even as we fought to abolish slavery, are among the vast proof of the racist intent in our society from the beginning. It’s not just about the South. It’s about everything. That’s why the movement to banish diversity and inclusivity as the stated goals, at least, in business, our government, our communities, is so dangerous and destructive.
The album’s first single reads as a power-to-the-people anthem for anyone who cares about justice — and sends a survival code to Black Americans to keep going, as they always have, no matter what.
Hold Steady shows how those troops at Gettysburg had to instigate some inner strength they didn’t know they had, when every option had been exhausted and they knew they were coming for them. That’s exactly what it means to be Black in America. Because they’re coming for us all the time, from every direction, and when we least expect it. And that inner strength comes from God.
This guitar-driven ballad is the blues, sure enough, inspired by Gettysburg’s Valley of Death, nestled between The Devil’s Den rock formation and a knoll called Little Round Top.
In those long last moments after experiencing that level of extreme violence in such a short period of time, I’d imagine just about anyone that close to death is going to cry out to whatever is beyond them. To the true believer, God says in His Word that He will never leave you or forsake you, even until the end of the age. For the one that is dying and holding onto that promise, they’re having a seismic come-to-Jesus moment. My question is, can someone who is a racist and a white supremacist be a God fearing Christian? Because racism and white supremacy are in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches and what Jesus says.
This country song is a knowing sneer at the Southerners’ defeat, with a folk-rock, bluegrass-influenced breakdown at the end.
I want listeners to come into a right relationship with this history, knowing that they’re a part of it. You can’t really say this doesn’t apply to you. This has everything to do with you. The Europeans benefitted so much from chattel slavery. A big part of their financial bonanza came from us, and it’s laughable to say anything else.
This stringband-style banjo and slide guitar-laden lament is a prayer for grace in the face of death. The beat grows weary in the end, a heart finally giving out.
This song is about Iverson’s Pits — named after Gen. Alfred Iverson Jr. — a place that some consider to be the most haunted section of the battlefield. Iverson was the Confederate leader who sent around 1,300 soldiers over Oak Ridge to take on some Yankee soldiers. Unfortunately, he didn’t send scouts first to know what he was up against. All of the soldiers were attacked en masse, with Iverson safely in the rear. Ultimately, over 900 soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured, and that fight lasted less than 15 minutes. It was a mass grave until the 1870s, so who’s to say they got every single soldier? The ridiculous amount of documented paranormal activity at that ridge says otherwise.
Along with I Feel So Alive, this stunner feels like the heart of this album. An earlier version of Oh My Stars buoyed by strings appeared on Queen Esther’s pandemic album, Rona. This version is guitar-based, more rustic and fitting for a rural battlefield where a million stars could be seen.
It’s really about dying alone. The soldiers at Gettysburg, they were alone, alone, alone, like many COVID patients — when you had people standing outside hospital windows telling their loved ones goodbye. That’s where that song comes from. People dying alone, with only the star to comfort them, knowing that the people who care about them are looking up to the same sky. That and the presence of God. And if I’m lucky, someone will come along and hear my moans. It’s the kind of evil that this country brought on itself.
This song weaves hard country and blues together to put the rebels in their place. The steel guitar that sounds like a nervous voice on the run.
This song is about the Confederacy but also the insistence on lost causes, the refusal to evolve, and the dangerous nostalgia that weaponizes victimhood. It’s a direct critique of the Lost Cause ideology and its contemporary heirs, from the Daughters of the Confederacy to Jan. 6, 2021.
“You have to believe we are magic, nothing can stand in our way.” Queen Esther’s cover of Olivia Newton John’s mystical 1980 hit from Xanadu comes from the same well as her other interpretations of classic pop and rock, which include a bebop version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and cover of Bread’s Lost Without Your Love on Rona to her gospel-influenced take on the Eagles’ Take It to the Limit on her 2021 album, Gild the Black Lily.
Toni Morrison said, “We were never supposed to survive.” And she was right. The fact that our ancestors lived through the horrors of slavery and then endured legal disenfranchisement from a system that we built and violence from home-grown terrorists to enforce all of it — it’s a miracle that any descendant of enslaved Africans are still here. And yet, we are. Our existence is our testimony. All the ways that we’ve thrived in the face of home grown hate, that’s our testimony. It’s not magic. It’s divine intervention. It’s divine favor. It is the will of God. There’s no other way to explain it.
A hard-country tune with a lilting beat and deceptively memorable melody — a reminder and a warning for anyone willing to listen.
Country music is three chords and the truth, right? It’s a Black American country protest song that rejects platitudes and exposes the illusion of freedom, full stop. Now that federally funded ICE agents are treating everyone the way that Black people have always been treated, the world will know how free Black people have never been, and the illusion the rest of the country has wrapped themselves up in like a big delulu blanket.
Queen Esther has performed this stirring spiritual a cappella, a plea for endurance, in her live shows. Here, it’s sung to a steady, unrelenting beat.
This is the kind of gospel song I’d hear when I was a little kid, when I went to church with my great-grandparents, my mother’s grandparents. It’s a testimony, really. Simple. Straightforward. I love to sing songs that I know my ancestors sang and this is definitely one of them. Because it connects us and I love that connectedness. The idea of not belonging to this world, to being alien to what’s around you as a true believer in Christ, that’s one thing. Another layer to it was W.E.B. DuBois more than 100 years ago, who deconstructed the idea of Black people as aliens in America in his seminal book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk. It’s just as true now as it was then: Double consciousness epitomizes our way of life. When both of these ideas are applied to this song, it takes on a new meaning.
A fitting closer for this album, the late Robert Palmer wrote and first performed it, followed by the great Bonnie Raitt’s cover on her 1979 album The Glow.
That song has been the sonic wallpaper of my life. Who doesn’t like Bonnie Raitt and Robert Palmer? He meant it as a break-up song. She meant it as a song to empower women. I mean for it to empower Black people. No one has ever talked to the South in this way — especially a Black Southerner. No one’s ever told the South, the Lost Cause, the power and money and hate and the killing of so many, no one has ever stood up and said, ‘You got what was coming to you when you lost the Civil War.’ No one tells them that they lost the war! They don’t even go that far! Because each song on this album is about the past and the present, this song says you lost the war and goes further by insisting you’re still gonna get what’s coming to you, you’re going to get divine retribution, because of all the evil that you’re still perpetuating.
It’s not just the South that’s going to get it, either. It’s America.
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