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Publication Date

7-23-2025

Keywords

“Singing the Blues, ” Social Protest, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Economic Injustice, Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics

Abstract

This paper explores the biblical and historical continuity of women’s voices “singing the blues” in social protest across different contexts. The blues as a musical genre spans a myriad of themes, including social protest. Black female blues songs such as Bessie Smith’s “Poor Man’s Blues” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” were the blues songs of lament and social protest, protesting economic injustice and the brutality of lynching respectively. This paper explores how two biblical women — Hannah in “Hannah’s Song” (1 Samuel 2:1-10) and Mary in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) — sang the blues of social protest. These biblical women, the foremothers of artists like Smith and Holiday, “sang the blues” of social protest by taking aim at the wealthy and powerful and protesting the oppression and injustice experienced by the poor. This paper explores the issue of social protest, using a contemporary lens provided by womanist scholar Wil Gafney, and in conversation with interlocutors such as Black liberation theologian James Cone, theologian Walter Brueggemann, and political activist and scholar Angela Davis. Gafney calls for “keening” — an ancient women’s song of lament and grief — to sing out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) and to protest the death and harm experienced by Black bodies. Hannah, Mary, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, BLM, and people keening are all in concert by naming, interrogating, and resisting oppression and social injustice. This comparative analysis underscores the continuity of women’s voices as central to the resistance against injustice across time and contributes to the theological and cultural discourses on aesthetic expressions, such as song, that participate in the actions of social justice.

DOI

10.15365/sst.2025.0954

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