Any discussion that purports to examine the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions under which blues and gospel performers have had to operate must take as its own genesis the dawn of the North Atlantic slave trade, surely one of the bleakest sunrises in human history. Nearly 250 years of the enforced system of legal chattel slavery in North America established a network of laws, attitudes, and strategies, imposed with a frequently vigorous and hateful, sometimes paternalistic and condescending, or misguided benevolent force that contributed to shaping the physical, spiritual, psychological, social, and cultural lives of the enslaved and their descendants. Reconstruction brought hope, post-Reconstruction disappointment, and the Jim Crow-era dismay and anger as a result of the unfulfilled promises of one of humanity's most promising systems. “I got the back woods blues,” sang Rosa Henderson in 1924, “but I don't want to go back home”, the indignities of the Jim Crow cars and southern mistreatment overwhelming her desire to visit her childhood abode. Cow Cow Davenport expressed the sentiment, too – “I'm tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim Crow town” – but he left room open at the end of his song to sing about coming back if the North did not full its promise – an all-too-common occurrence.

Most blues and many gospel performers, after all, have been African Americans, the descendants of slaves, and heirs to this racism and discrimination in their myriad forms, from the far greater likelihood of existing below the poverty level, to discrimination in housing, employment and education, to discriminatory attitudes that associate the “race” with intellectual inferiority and intensified appetitive passions, to the subtle and not-so-subtle internalization of such attitudes to create at times a self-hatred or self destructiveness.