(ThyBlackMan.com) When I think about the roots of blues music—the raw honesty, the pain wrapped in poetry, the joy carved out of hardship—I think of Ma Rainey. Her voice was more than a sound; it was ...

“When someone tells me they’re from Massachusetts/ Now I always ask, ‘What part?’” Jensen McRae sings in a song fragment she released on TikTok late last year. The singer-songwriter and poet soulfully ...