America’s Contradiction Gave Birth to THE BLUES

How Black music heard America before America heard itself

Bent Note: The Seed and the Song

It is the contradictions deep within us that give birth to humanity’s soul. The moment the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” were written was the moment that breathed life into America’s soul. Soul music, blues music, rock ’n’ roll, gospel music, all are the same defiant tree, its seed planted with those words.

Family we need to sit down and talk for a minute.

Writers are full of shit. That includes me. I can take solace in the fact that I have a sense of awareness of my own philosophical contradictions enough to know that my file full of flowery essays while full of grievances and sentiments I think you want to hear is perhaps exactly what you don’t want to hear. Perhaps what you, the reader, really want to hear is exactly what I, the writer, wish to conceal. Maybe I’m tired of this Substack game of performative pretense. Maybe our nation’s founding fathers were too.

This essay is the story I refused to tell. Years of research that should have become a book ended up buried under my own bad assumptions. They say: establish authority by flaunting expertise. I’ll establish mine by telling you where I was wrong.

The Declaration’s Hidden Verse

This essay is also about the story the forefathers buried. The Declaration almost joined the place where grand projects go when courage blinks and ego takes the wheel: the forget pile. What kept it breathing was one stubborn sentence: “all men are created equal.” It kept beating under their edits like a hidden drum, while the lines naming slavery were cut. Blues music took that backbeat and carried the truth they refused to print.

Somehow writing this maybe is a way to exorcise the demons of failure. Maybe these enlightened men, our founding fathers and make no mistake about it, they were the pinnacle of Enlightenment thinkers were, in writing the Declaration of Independence, not just making a stand against a tyrant king, but a stand against their own tyrannical proclivities.

The record is clear: southern delegates led by South Carolina and Georgia would not sign if Jefferson’s slavery indictment remained. They called it ruinous, incendiary, a knife in the contract. Remove it, or the South bolts.

All this over a passage written by Thomas Jefferson himself, the same man who later argued Black inferiority. His original clause read:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.

Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:

Confession: Authority by Error

Family, in this essay I’m attempting the exorcism of my own demons of writer procrastination and failure. The delegates, particularly those from southern states, perhaps got tired of what we might label today virtue signaling and just threw up their hands and said, “fuck it, Thomas, you want to feel good about your lofty ideals?” (imagine the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina using finger air quotes) “go ahead and say ‘all men were created equal,’ but people will know that *all men* surely doesn’t mean what you mean, Thomas.” Perhaps it was at this point they thought they had exorcised their own demons and the demons of a nation.

I just might have saved this book by confronting my own shortcomings. Jefferson, in confronting his own philosophical hypocrisies, just may have forced the nation to confront its own, even if delayed, and as a consequence help create the primordial soup that became a uniquely American form of expression: BLUES MUSIC.

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The Ledger of All Men

You said all men, yet here I am still in bondage after the war against the king you said would keep me in chains. You said all men, yet after a war fought for freedom and the Union, my family is subject to terror at night by men in white sheets. You said all men, yet after a war fought against those espousing the supremacy of a master race, I must endure the indignity of “separate but equal,” which in fact is anything but equal.

These are the words I feel pressing through some invisible veil into my soul whenever I feel that whiff of doubt and hesitation at whether I should even write this. I’m not some ivory tower academic scholar, just a retired cop who saw the cold face of justice that was anything but blind. My blindness, while it did obscure my ability to connect the dots through history, the sound eventually made its way through into my soul and now I see.

Blues purists who swear by a “primitive Africa” origin and scold the church link, prepare to clutch those pearls; the roll call of singers who crossed from Sunday service to Saturday night is long.

Now, what is it that I now see and, most importantly, what caused me to see it? My kid asked me not too long ago where did R&B music come from. Hungry to avoid this long drawn-out “adult” discussion about slavery and racial prejudice in the Deep South, I just blurted out “gospel” as a deflection. Bam. End of story. I just avoided a conversation about the complicated and tragic origins of a complicated music by telling what I thought amounted to a gross oversimplification that was almost an outright lie. Or was it?

When the southern delegates, in that “fuck it” moment, canceled Jefferson’s original draft of “All men were created equal,” did they too believe that the all men are equal phrase was an oversimplification that almost amounted to a lie? When Sally Hemings—Jefferson’s slave and concubine—stared directly into the eyes of one of THE founding fathers and asked Jefferson if her Black children were just as worthy of a human existence unshackled by the chains of bondage, and he blurted out “yes,” was he then saying what he truly believed or was it too an oversimplification that amounted to a lie? Did Jefferson in that moment just say to himself “fuck it” and throw all his Enlightenment intellectual sophistry to the wind and decide to free her children—his children—while the rest of the nation’s free-labor stock remained in chains throughout the South?

The Choir and the Gospel Spine

That moment, the “fuck it” moment where abandonment precedes the truth, is a moment of revelation. The nation’s failure to live up to its ideals even after millions sacrificed their lives on the battlefield to settle it for once and for all is also a revelatory moment. Out of that very surrender, the “fuck it” that both reveals and conceals, came a different kind of author. Where the founders wrote, others would sing,

love where you’re taking this. here’s a beefed-up replacement block you can drop in after your Fisk sentence. it keeps your voice, adds the missing history, and folds in Ella’s story with care + receipts.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were not a novelty choir; they were a Reconstruction miracle engineered out of necessity. Fisk University opened in 1866 under the American Missionary Association for newly freed people, but by 1871 the school was broke. George L. White—a Union veteran turned treasurer and music teacher—gathered nine students and put them on the road to keep the college alive. He named them the “Jubilee” Singers after Leviticus’s year of release, when debts are canceled and the enslaved go free. The name wasn’t branding; it was a theology of freedom set to breath.

They toured a hostile country—denied lodging, mocked in the press—and insisted on singing the very “slave songs” white audiences called uncultured. That refusal to perform minstrelsy changed American ears: spirituals like “Steal Away,” “Go Down, Moses,” and “Swing Low” entered concert halls and, with them, the memory of bondage carried in blue notes. The money they raised built Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building for Black higher education in the South, and their success eventually carried them to the White House and across Europe.

At the center was Ella Sheppard—pianist, arranger, assistant director, the matriarch who taught, tuned, and transcribed the songs. Her life carried the nation’s split inside it. As a child, her enslaved mother, Sarah, learned the mistress had turned little Ella into a spy; in despair she ran to the river to drown them both rather than see her daughter sold downriver. An elder woman stopped her. Years later Ella’s father purchased her freedom; Ella grew into the singer whose hands and ear would lift a people’s repertoire onto the world’s stage. That is the sound you hear in those arrangements: survival interrupting despair.

By 1873 the singers expanded and crossed the Atlantic; audiences who had never seen freed Black students on a major stage heard a music that was prayer and protest at once. The tours saved the school and revised the nation’s idea of “American” music. If Jefferson’s words taught the country to say liberty, the Jubilee Singers taught it how liberty feels—a lament turning toward hope until the phrase can stand.

Here’s a seamless, fuller weave you can paste in. I kept your cadence and folded in the missing history and Ella’s story so the argument flows straight into your “demons/exorcism → Jefferson” turn.

Their revelatory moment came only after they faced the thing they’d been trained to avoid. Fisk University barely five years old, born in Army barracks and already broke—had sent a small choir on the road to save the school. George L. White named them “Jubilee” after the year of release, debts canceled, the enslaved set free. At the piano sat Ella Sheppard, arranger, assistant director, the woman whose mother, in despair, once ran to the river to drown them both rather than see her child sold downriver, and was stopped at the water’s edge. That interruption, survival breaking through terror, became the tremor in Ella’s hands and the memory in her ear.

These spirituals were not museum pieces; they were ancestral utterances of hope and lament—call-and-response, moan and vow bending notes until joy and pain could live in the same breath. They called them spirituals; we later would call it soul.

When they abandoned the respectable and safe colder European-style hymns and anthems for their people’s cabin songs, the room changed. Tears fell first. Then the money. The repertoire that polite society had dismissed as “slave songs” paid the school’s debts and raised Jubilee Hall, a stone castle of learning rising from the place where wooden barracks once stood. The music didn’t just move audiences; it moved history.

The greatest leaps forward for humanity come when we stop purifying the outside and begin exorcising the inside. Animals can only fight what’s in front of them; humans carry the rare capacity to wrestle what’s within. The Jubilee Singers did that work by turning private terror into public prayer and in doing so taught a nation how to feel its own words. Jefferson was willing, I believe, to peer at his demons; like the country he midwifed, he did not finish. He left us holding the baggage with demons that spilled into fields and courthouses and left a million men dead, their echo still rattling the chambers of our modern discourse.

Blues music appears to reconcile this unfinished business by giving us a blueprint to exorcise our demons. Yes, my fellow blues purists and aficionados, the spirituals, the forerunner of gospel music, were the blues. The visceral emotional reactions of crowds before the Fisk Jubilee Singers bursting into tears at their emotionally driven spirituals not just in all-white venues in the Midwest but also in European countries with audiences who didn’t even understand the words attest to this American genre of music as being blues and not just an offshoot of blues.

My own moment of truth on this issue came not long after my dismissive “it came from gospel,” explanation blurted out to a child too young to understand the complexities.

In a synchronous call and response fashion it was as if the universe stepped in and chastised my arrogance posing as protection when the song by Natalie Cole, I’ve Got Love On My Mind, showed up on my YT feed and I hit play. Of course I had heard the song before, as this had been a mainstay on the Black stations I grew up on as a very young kid. But now it was as if my eyes had been blind up until that point and now I see. She kicked off the song with, “The Lord is blessing me…” What? That’s not in the original song. (It wasn’t. This was a live performance.) Maybe she was just a little tipsy on this performance and got confused with her gospel set. (She wasn’t; I found multiple live performances with the same phrase uttered.)

Any musician who has actually spent time on a stage and in any recording studio will be like, “OK, so what? R&B musicians routinely steal—uhm, I mean draw from the gospel music they grew up on as inspiration.” It’s why even the elders in the church back in the days before blues got its rhythm and jump beat decried it as the devil’s music—not because of its lyrical differences with the Lord’s music but because of its striking, indistinguishable similarities to the Lord’s music, which posed a threat to church dominance. It harkened back to the trope of the devil posing as an angel in disguise. A deeper analysis of “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” reveals not a devil posing as an angel but rather an angel posing as a mortal human.

And that’s the irony hiding in plain sight. Strip away the sequins and studio polish and “I’ve Got Love on My Mind” is a gospel service in street clothes. The rhythm rocks instead of struts; it sways like a congregation finding its footing after prayer. The piano walks the same little “home-and-back-home” path that every church accompanist plays when they want to keep the spirit moving. Each phrase lands on a soft “amen,” and the background voices answer her the way a choir answers the preacher. Even the way Natalie keeps repeating that one line—“I’ve got love on my mind”—is the church vamp, the moment you loop a truth until it becomes real.

The lyric just changes the addressee. On Sunday the singer would say Lord instead of lover, but the feeling, the reach, the surrender—it’s the same motion of the heart. That’s why it hits so deep: the song carries both sanctity and desire in one breath. It’s not the devil sneaking into the sanctuary; it’s the sanctuary stepping out into the world. In other words, not a devil disguised as an angel, but an angel walking among mortals, humming a love song that’s still a prayer.

What does a love ballad by Natalie Cole have to do with the Decleration of Independence? Everything. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” reads like statute until a body risks tenderness. Love is the ordinary revolution. It refuses commodification and stitches personhood back together. The framers named the ends; our music rehearses the means. A love that endures bills and grief is the daily practice of liberty. When Natalie opens her mouth and the congregation answers, the republic remembers how to breathe. Happiness is belonging, safety, permission to open your throat and sing without penalty. That is constitutional.

This is why the sight of Barack and Michelle, hand in hand and smiling in spite of the weather of this country, made rooms exhale. In a nation that sold spouses across different blocks, Black love in public acts as argument and benediction. People cheered as a wound heard its name and felt a bandage. Somewhere the unclaimed dead and the families broken by bondage could look down and say, “Yes. We did it.” The ballad is a love story and a civic rehearsal, private tenderness carried into the square. That is the pursuit of happiness set to a backbeat, the chorus that keeps teaching America how to be what it promised.

Unclaimed: Toward Grace

I’m not an academic. I’m not an intellectual. I’m just a man who used to wear a badge and wake up every morning convinced he could keep a little corner of the world in order. Now I’m retired, and the ghosts come to visit—not the ones you’d expect. Not shoot-outs or high-speed chases, not the heavy, lingering reek of a dead body after a natural death call. Those fade.

The one that stays is a single name on a report from a nursing home, a woman whose body waited for someone to come claim it and no one did. I spent hours hunting through databases, calling old numbers, piecing a life together so she wouldn’t vanish without witness. When I finally found a granddaughter somewhere out of state, she couldn’t make the trip. So the woman went into the ground beneath a marker that simply read “unclaimed.” I told myself it was routine, just paperwork, but the truth is that name has been haunting me ever since. She deserved a song.

Maybe we all do. Maybe the blues was written for people like her, people quietly erased from the record. That’s what I hear now when I listen to the music I’ve been writing about: an entire nation of unclaimed souls still waiting for somebody to say their names out loud. Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” then left a woman he claimed to love and a people he enslaved unclaimed. That’s the country’s original missing-persons case, and the blues has been filing the report ever since.

I want to believe that somewhere beyond the noise and beyond the world of the living that woman heard what I couldn’t say in life: that I fought for her dignity, that I tried to be decent. I want to believe Sally Hemings can finally rest in a world where love doesn’t have to hide behind property laws. I want to believe Jefferson himself can see what his words became: both wound and medicine, both hypocrisy and hope. If the music teaches us anything, it’s that confession can still lead to grace.

So I pour a drink and put on Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. I step away from the endless drumbeat of hate and let that bass line roll like a heartbeat. The horns rise like a prayer. For a few minutes the song does what my mouth can’t: it bridges the gap between who we are and who we keep saying we’ll be.

And under it I hear the country’s first bent note: a contradiction breathing a nation into being. We hold these truths… cut a groove the size of a promise, and every blues, gospel, soul record since has been the needle returning to it. That defiant tree you met at the start still drinks from the same sentence—all men are created equal—even when the wind tries to snap its limbs. Contradiction is the pressure that makes the note true. So we keep the record spinning, we keep loving past our fear, we keep reaching for life, for liberty, for the pursuit of a happiness wide enough for everyone. Until hate runs dry, let the needle find the old groove and teach us the harmony we owe each other. When the chorus comes around again, may we finally sing it in tune.

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Family, Keep this record spinning.

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