The Healing Balm of Black Music

Inside a Honda Civic stranded along a busy Baltimore interstate, a woman sat with her head pressed against the steering wheel, sobbing. She not only had a flat tire but, in a cruel twist of cosmic irony, also discovered her spare tire was inoperable. As her 1-year-old daughter dozed in her car seat, the woman settled into a brief, self-piteous cry.

Full disclosure: I was the woman. It was one of those moments when a series of problems, ranging from fairly trivial inconveniences to life-devastating challenges, had recently accumulated and spilled over. The biggest was that I was very viscerally experiencing my first heartbreak. My college boyfriend, the father of the sleeping baby in the back seat, had un-relationshipped our relationship, and every part of my life seethed with sorrow.

“Black music has helped individuals and communities elevate joy, navigate pain, find solace and emotional resilience, and survive the daily traumas and aggressions of systemic racism.”

In that moment, with the radio one of the only parts of the car safe to operate, God inhabited the rises and falls of Yolanda Adams’ majestic voice in the song “Open My Heart” to connect with me. I’d heard the track before, describing the weariness of losing strength as hopes and dreams fade. It was a rare crossover success for a gospel single 25 years ago, and it peaked at No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at No. 10 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. It was everywhere, and its lyrics were an anthem for where I was—a young Black woman, a single mother, jobless and partnerless, dejected and depleted but wanting to believe that struggle was not my permanent lot in life.

This is the nucleus of Black music, the ability to reach into our experiences, seemingly small and insular, to cultivate something meaningful we can communally share. Categorically, it’s entertainment, but that’s just one small element of its importance. With the soul-lifting harmonies of gospel, the improvisational brilliance of jazz, the raw honesty of reggae, the verbal alchemy that is hip-hop, and with roots in other genres like rock, country, and blues, Black music has helped individuals and communities elevate joy, navigate pain, find solace and emotional resilience, and survive the daily traumas and aggressions of systemic racism.

The Science of Therapeutic Sound

The ancestry of Black music in America is imbued with the essence of spirituals, rhythmic work songs, and call-and-response traditions sung by enslaved Africans. These songs served dual purposes: They uplifted weary souls and, at the same time, encoded messages about news, resistance, and escape. Throughout the musical lineage that developed, Black music became a communal practice of survival, a way to reclaim agency in a world invested in stripping it away. The tradition of healing through sound evolved with each generation, weaving its way into blues, R&B, and rap.

“Music has always been a way for Black communities to process pain, create joy, and collectively exhale,” explains Grant Jones, a musician and doctoral candidate in the clinical psychology program at Harvard University. “It’s a space to feel seen and held, especially in moments of profound struggle. Music is a way to say, ‘I see you, I hear you, and we’re going to get through this together.’”

In 2023, Jones explored its therapeutic potential in a unique intervention: an album combining music with meditation techniques designed to alleviate race-based anxiety for middle-to-low-income Black people. He found that Black Americans who engage with music—particularly in group settings like concerts, worship services, or family gatherings—reported lower levels of stress and anxiety and higher levels of spiritual connectedness. That research aligns with a broader 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, which documented how collective musical experiences can significantly reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults.

Dive into the world of music, prayer, and spiritual transformation.

Because systemic racism puts people of color at a higher risk for anxiety and depression disorders than white people, it also exacerbates post-traumatic stress and racial trauma. In 2022, roughly 16 percent of Black Americans, some 7 million individuals, reported experiencing a mental illness in the past year. Although that percentage mirrors the rate of incidence for white people, the symptoms for Black people are more likely to be chronic and persistent—as opposed to episodic. As studies continue, researchers like Jones know these figures don’t likely represent the full prevalence of race-based anxiety because systemic factors can influence diagnosis and reporting, and individuals experiencing its symptoms might not always accurately attribute their anxiety to racial experiences.

In his pilot study, Jones tested his intervention with 17 participants, and the preliminary findings also showed increased mindfulness and self-compassion. It’s a small sample, he admits, but the early signals are encouraging and a solid foundation for more rigorous studies around music’s potential to heal—particularly in cognitive and personality-based studies that explore how passive musical activities like pairing music and meditation differ from active musical activities like songwriting or playing an instrument.

“I think there’s a massive opportunity within science just to understand and document Black music,” Jones adds, careful to differentiate his study from music therapy, another specialization. “I think it’s such an underexplored area of investigation, but if used the right way, it could really help a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life.”

A Transformational Tool

Inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (formerly San Quentin State Prison), the largest correctional facility in California, a Swedish music producer named David Jassy asked a friend to send him a keyboard. It was 2015 and, at the time, he was serving a 15-year-to-life sentence for second-degree murder. He needed something positive to pour himself into, and when he started playing—after his cellmate convinced officers to let Jassy keep the keyboard in the first place—other men stopped by his cell and started rapping over his instrumental beats.

Inspired by the interest, Jassy initiated the Youthful Offender Program (Y.O.P.) Mixtape Project to mentor young incarcerated men and encourage them to write and record their life stories over hip-hop music. He had only two rules: no cursing and no references to violence. “Everyone [in prison] is walking around in an aggressive state because they don’t want to be a victim,” Jassy told Rolling Stone in 2020. “Once you stand there in front of the microphone and you’re talking about apologizing to your mom or something that’s dear to you, a lot of guys broke down in tears. That’s an experience I’ve never had before in the music industry.”

The project released San Quentin Mixtapes, Vol. 1, a 17-track album all written, recorded, and produced inside the facility, featuring contributions from men of different ages, backgrounds, and affiliations. The goal was to provide a therapeutic outlet and promote rehabilitation through creative expression. Since Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted Jassy’s sentence to time served in 2020, the program has continued to garner attention from respected artists like Common and DJ Khaled, who support its mission to offer hope through hip-hop’s characteristic effervescence.

“Being incarcerated causes people immediately to become stigmatized. This can even that playing field a little bit and create more understanding,” explains Eric Abercrombie, who has said his participation in the program and transition as a person is a testament to the dynamism of music. “We’re regaining the power of narrative. These guys are not monsters,” he told Rolling Stone. “They may have come up rough, but they do have something to give back to society.”

The American Psychiatric Association has documented the benefits of music therapy, noting that it can alleviate symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain. In Black communities, where systemic barriers often limit access to mental health care, music serves as an accessible and culturally resonant access point to self-care. It is an archive of survival stories and a testament to the transcendental strength we carry through generations.

When I was a child, I could almost see tension physically drop off of my mother—who worked 10- to 14-hour shifts on her feet as a factory worker—whenever she pressed play on the satiny voices of Marvin Gaye and Teddy Pendergrass. I noticed the way my nana stopped whatever she was doing to stand in the living room doorway to watch James Brown or Aretha Franklin performing on TV, both because she adored their music and because she was proud to see their Black talent on her screen. I watched my grandfather smile through the process of pulling a vinyl record from its sleeve and putting it on his ancient turntable so the instrumental geniuses of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane could soar through the house.

Black music is a space where pain is acknowledged and transformed into something beautiful, just like “Open My Heart” did for me in my explosive grief on that sad, two-flat-tires day years ago. It’s a process of converting sorrow into strength and resilience. Blues emerged as an outlet for the tribulations of post-slavery life, and artists like Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson gave voice to Black folks’ heartbreaks and hardships at the time, creating a shared emotional language for their listeners. During the Civil Rights Movement, songs like “We Shall Overcome” became anthems to unite marchers and reinforce their resolve. In that very same way, hip-hop is a contemporary chronicle of Black life, and rappers have spun vulnerability into lyrical gold to articulate the everyday fears and frustrations their communities have about the job market, family dynamics, community violence, and injustice.

For Jones, music is both a mirror for Black pain and a means of transcending it. “I think my work invites other folks to bring their own life experiences and apply them with clinical scientific methods so that we can better understand how to use music as a tool for uplifting others’ well-being,” he says. “The more we can get folks to invest in this work and the more folks from as many different backgrounds and cultures and walks of life as possible get involved, the better off we’ll all be.”

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health^®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now