A Meditation on Soul, Sound, and the Ghosts That Sing Through Us
When I was a boy, like most Black children raised in America, I laughed when Africa was mentioned. Not because it was funny but because we had been taught to laugh. Conditioned to see our origin not as a source of pride but as a place of backwardness. What the media didn’t mock outright, it rendered invisible. So, we were left to fill the void with jokes, half-truths, and cartoon images of loincloths and drums. The continent became abstract. It became distant. It became everything but ours.
But as I grew, so did my questions. And the laughter gave way to a different kind of sound—the sound of knowing.
We began to ask: When did our music begin? Where did it come from? What did we create in the spaces where even language had been stolen? The answers don’t live in textbooks or museum plaques. They live in the air. They live in the hum of our grandmother’s voice as she cleans. In the moan of a man dragging his feet after twelve hours on the line. In the drumless beat that lived in our throats when all else had been taken.
Our music began in the fields. Not in studios. Not in arenas. Not even in churches. It started under the weight of cotton, under the eye of the overseer, under the crack of the lash.
It began as moaning—deep, wordless, and primal. It was the closest thing to prayer many of us could manage. Because to pray, you need hope. And for the enslaved, hope was dangerous. So, instead, we sang.
We sang to stay sane. We sang to stay human. We sang to stay alive.
From those field hollers came the roots of something uniquely ours. The Blues.
They called it the devil’s music. But what they didn’t say is that the devil they feared was the truth. Because the Blues told it. The Blues didn’t pretend. It didn’t cause pain. It set it to a twelve-bar pattern and let it breathe. It made grief rhythmic. It gave loneliness structure. It turned absence into presence.
This was not Europe’s music. This was not borrowed. This was born. Born from people who had no instruments, so they became them. Born from people who had no nation, so they made one out of sound. Born from people who had every reason to be silent and still found a way to sing.
We called it the Blues, but it was more than that. It was a ledger of loss. It was oral scripture. It was our way of remembering in a country that told us to forget.
From the Blues came Soul.
Not a genre. A declaration.
You have to understand that Soul wasn’t invented. It was revealed. It was the sound of field songs baptized in Gospel that fed on the Blues and was set loose in cities that never fully welcomed us.
You can hear it in Sam Cooke’s croon, in Aretha’s roar, in Curtis Mayfield’s quiet thunder. Soul was not about being smooth or marketable. It was about being seen letting the full, ungovernable weight of our joy and heartbreak crash through speakers that once filtered our pain.
And even then—even at its height—they tried to soften it. To sand down its edges. To make it palatable. Because America has always loved Black music more than it has loved Black people.
And so came the theft.
They stole our sound, dressed it in pale skin, and sold it back to us. They took our rawness and gave it polish. Took our sorrow and gave it a spin. They called it rock ‘n’ roll. They called it pop. They called it American.
They rarely called it Black.
Our music was repackaged, rerouted, and rendered safe for suburban ears. The Gospel in it muted. The struggle was silenced. What had been born in the crucible of bondage became elevator music. What once carried the weight of chains became background noise for shopping malls.
And we are supposed to be grateful for the exposure.
And now, there is another kind of theft creeping in—a quieter one but no less insidious.
There is a growing chorus of voices from the continent claiming that the musical expressions born in the cotton fields, juke joints, and The Black churches of the American South were not the creations of Foundational Black Americans but rather extensions of African traditions. They say we borrowed our harmonies, our rhythms, our Soul from ancestral roots. And while it is true that rhythm and spiritual depth traveled with us across the Atlantic, what was built here—in the ashes of slavery, in the belly of Jim Crow, in the shadow of redlining—was ours.
Our music did not evolve in the warm circle of communal drum fires but in the cold silence of forced labor. It did not grow in celebratory dance but in whispered prayer. It was not handed down intact. It was reconstructed from what could be remembered, imagined, and reshaped under duress.
To say that the Blues is African is to ignore that it was birthed in chains. To say that Soul came from African rhythms is to forget that those rhythms were not allowed to survive intact here.
The Blues, jazz, Gospel, Soul, hip-hop—these are not direct imports. They are American creations born from the suffering, resilience, and genius of Black Americans. They are ours.
And now, Hollywood has found a way to tell it back to us. The movie Sinners speaks of the Blues. It drapes the sound in story, in mystery, in the supernatural. It shows the music as a kind of bridge—between generations, between pain and healing, between this life and the next.
It is not perfect. But it touches something real.
Because we know—and have always known—that our music is spiritual. Not just in the religious sense. Spiritual as in sacred. Spiritual as in bound to something greater than survival.
Our music remembers. It remembers those who never had names. It remembers those who disappeared. It remembers what textbooks omitted, what whitewashed museums refuse to say.
The Blues isn’t just music. It’s mourning. Soul isn’t just rhythm. It’s reclamation.
There is no true beginning to our music. Because we didn’t arrive here in silence.
We brought rhythm in our footsteps. We brought the song in our mouths. And when they tried to beat it out of us, we built it back louder.
And there is no end. Because we are still singing. Still sampling. Still remixing memory.
You can hear it in Kendrick Lamar’s fury. In D’Angelo’s whispers. In the rasp of Brittany Howard. In every young artist who refuses to let the culture be flattened.
We don’t need monuments. We have melody.
We don’t need permission. We have a voice.
And when we are gone, the music will still be here. Singing the names of those who were never called. Humming the history no one else wanted to write. Telling the truth in a language that can’t be stolen.
We did not bring instruments. We became them. And we will not go quietly.
By Kyle J. Hayes
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