My Chains Ain’t Just Mine: Blues from a Burdened Spirit

 When I first listened to gospel and blues as a child, I thought they were just sad songs. As I’ve grown, I now see they’re not songs about pain, they're prayers through it. Prayers we sing with our heads bowed, shoulders hunched, but hearts still pulsing. This week, I pulled back the veil on three social sufferings: emotional isolation, generational poverty, and the illusion of strength in masculinity—burdens I’ve both inherited and carried silently. And I turned to three songs for release, clarity, and confrontation.

1. “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” – Marvin Gaye

“Ah, things ain’t what they used to be…”

This is not just a protest song, it's a mourning. Marvin doesn’t sing from anger; he sings from ache. The instrumentation is smooth, almost hypnotic, but it contrasts the despair woven into every word. And it mirrors the emotional isolation I often feel in today’s world. We’re surrounded by noise, flooded with connection and yet, something inside us stays untouched, unknown. Gaye’s lament over the destruction of the Earth becomes a metaphor for something more internal: the ways we’ve polluted our own souls to survive a polluted world. He cries for the trees, for the skies, for the future and I hear a man crying for himself, too. That duality cracked something in me. The world’s brokenness reflects back the loneliness within, and Marvin’s voice gave that silence a song. Personally, I’ve experienced this ache of loneliness in my own life. I’ve faced many injuries during sports and it isolates you leaving you with double consciousness. Being socially limited in comparison to your peers and their performances but still having the internal desire to be more leaves you stuck. You begin to cry for mercy and hope that in the midst of it all better is still on the way. This challenged me from a masculine perspective. Loneliness felt like a breach in my masculinity and not being able to compete left me helpless in being able to counteract those emasculating thoughts. So when Marvin says “Ah, things ain’t what they used to be…” I feel that in my core, in the depths of my person because the shackles of masculinity can be both invigorating and debilitating.

 

2. “Born Under a Bad Sign” – Albert King

“If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all…”

This song swaggers with defeat. It’s blues that limps with style. The rhythm grooves, but it’s not happy, it’s resigned. This song felt like the soundtrack to growing up in a neighborhood where bills beat us to the mailbox. Generational poverty is like being born into a game where the rules were written before you got here, and you’re losing before you even play. But Albert King doesn’t cry about it, in fact, he owns it. That’s the signifyin’ in blues. There’s pride in pain. A smirk in suffering. The song doesn’t ask for pity. It says, “This is the truth, and I’m still here.” That’s resistance. That’s survival. And that’s soul. This directly relates to Saidiya Hartman’s concept of the ethics of black life as wayward life. Albert King's assumed ownership allows him to take responsibility for the narrative of struggle as a black individual. This is something we all could learn from. Growing up in church, so many messages were constructed on how to endure struggle but never on how to prosper. Don’t we as black individuals deserve to connote wealth, prosperity, and success? This is something I’ve had to study in my own development so that I could re-identify myself. And in doing that it vitalized my masculinity. I became able to see myself as a provider and protector because I felt equipped with the mental resources to be those things for the ones around me. But first it starts with taking poverty, having dominion over it and your own story and simply having the choice to decide who you want to be and that’s what King did. In his ownership of poverty he gave himself the power of choice so that it could no longer be forced on him and he no longer would be a victim but an activist in his own story. It seems juxtaposing but it’s actually genius.

 

3. “I’d Rather Go Blind” – Etta James

This one…this one hit home. The first time I heard Etta wail that chorus, I knew what it felt like to want to ignore reality. The song isn’t just about lost love, it’s about the lies we tell ourselves to avoid falling apart. For me, toxic masculinity has often meant blinding myself to vulnerability. Being taught that feeling too much is weakness. That tears are threats, not therapy.

“Something told me it was over…”

Her voice cracks—raw and unfiltered. Etta feels what men are often told to suppress. In her heartbreak, I heard the truth I was taught to silence. I realized that masculinity can be a prison disguised as power. And blues helps unlock the door. Etta exemplifies this concept of Signifying that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains in depth. This metaphor of delusion that Etta uses forced me to assess the real pains that I’m ignoring in my own life. Confronting failures in relationships, sports, and even love allowed blues to heal me in a way I wasn’t aware I needed. Etta’s metaphoric symmetry to toxic masculinity allows me as a man to see how dangerous the suppression of emotions can be. Masculinity itself is strongest beside the feminine trait of vulnerability. A man that lacks a healthy amount of femininity lacks the ability to empathize with himself and when life begins to knock you down masculinity tells you to be hard on yourself whereas femininity encourages grace internally. This is a valuable lesson for men in today's world because empathy produces grounds for healing. Knowing how to feel is better than not feeling at all just as it is better to have loved then to have never loved at all. 

So in conclusion, the blues speak to me. The blues doesn’t offer answers. It offers language for the things we weren’t allowed to say. These songs gave me space to hurt, reflect, and be. Each melody a mirror. Each lyric a confession. This ain’t just music. It’s scripture for the soul-stained.