Holy Ghost Blues

This is an excerpt from Rasheena Fountain's book Starfish Blues: A Memoir, released April 22, 2026 and available to order.

I’ve felt the God that wraps around my body tightly, but gently—the God of Black Moses that offers direction. I needed versions of God that Grandma’s church couldn’t offer me, however. I needed freedom like Audre Lorde’s words—like blues riffs and house music.

Fountain as a DJ for a wedding in 2011

We need safe havens—places to feel free—even if those places are temporary. I felt that safety sometimes at Grandma’s church on the West Side in the 90s—there it was like I wasn’t on Chicago Avenue, and the liquor store and the corner drug market weren’t operating across the street. Organs and church spirituals have a way of transporting me through time, and I like living through that window, especially when it helps me feel free. In Grandma’s church, like other Black churches I’ve been to, I could feel God’s presence—not the God on the United States dollar. I’ve felt the God that wraps around my body tightly, but gently—the God of Black Moses that offers direction. I needed versions of God that Grandma’s church couldn’t offer me, however. I needed freedom like Audre Lorde’s words—like blues riffs and house music.

In the 90s, a lot of my Austin community looked to Jesus for God—for the power of healing, for being born again, and for hope. Grandma believed in miracles, like Jesus walking on water. I, too, believe in miracles.

In the many storefront churches, in our hood, God made us feel like our Black lives mattered more than they did in the world. The Lord turned weeping and wailing into fight songs. Grandma, a dedicated “ursher” and free, bluesy woman on the weekdays, attended one of the storefront churches, Lively Stone; it was just feet away from my favorite corner store on the avenue.

Searching for God in church is what I had been raised to do. I am from praying, miracle-claiming, supernatural, and another-realm-reining folks. My great-grandfather, started a church on Chicago’s West Side; it was a safe haven for my family and community. That isn’t the only storefront church I remember, though. As a DJ in my twenties, I only remember entering the record store George’s Music Room that once sat on West Roosevelt Road. I have no memory of physically being in my family’s storefront church before the fire that forced them to move to a nearby suburb. I knew Grandma’s storefront church on Chicago Avenue more.

As the Holy Ghost, God came to us in many forms—in slow Baptist gospel hymns, where voices dragged, dipped, and whined collectively. I could feel God in fast-paced guitar and organ riffs, which threaten Holy Ghost shouts. Baptist and Church of God in Christ (COGIC) church services are different, and I never saw Grandma shout like Dad’s side of the family shouted in COGIC services. The shouting scared the hell outta me. The dancing and being overtaken by an uncontrollable spirit didn’t look safe to me. I will admit that most of the popular dances now in 2020s look like COGIC Holy Ghost shouting, except the music when catching the spirit was fast tempo runs that made eyes roll back. Most people Holy Ghost shouting were in their thirties on up to elders with canes. I was told that catching the Holy Ghost was a SANCtified privilege and a sure sign of freedom from sin, but I spent most days at church mentally trying to avoid the ghost. I was scared, but I knew fear was a sin, so I was stuck somewhere in between zen and constipation sitting in my church pews.

I could tell that my family had found some version of freedom, even if I couldn’t quite embrace that freedom in this space. I was hiding, scared of being sniffed out, like a bloodhound was following my scent trail. My secrets were howlin’ wolves—the blues before I picked up the guitar and started playing them in church. I am a “sister outsider” like Lorde, so my blues are complicated. I was quiet in my youth, and the blues guitar gave me voice. I could express myself on guitar freely—without judgment as long as I rode the riffs and stayed on key.

My journey to blues on guitar was not linear. Back at Nash Elementary, I started leaning on music as an escape and a way to speak through the silence. Dad had given me an acoustic guitar around age five, but I didn’t feel invested in learning the guitar then. I was more interested in rap and began writing rhymes during that first year at Nash. I called myself Emcee Sheen and used Ma’s tape recorder to record myself rapping over beats from a Casio keyboard. I didn’t know anyone around me doing this, but the pull to music started early for me. It would grab at me in my dreams. I dream in song at times. I had the urge to write music. I would walk to the corner store with my ear pressed to the tape recorder listening to my creations; “Emcee Sheen, coming real mean” was the hook to my first song and it repeated over a three-note bass line and simple drums. Once, as I was walking, Fatima, one of the top drug dealers in the neighborhood and family friend, grabbed the tape out of my hands. She listened. “Oh okay, I see you,” she said smiling and listening to it. I wrote songs for my friends and forced them to form a girl group and do a talent show with me, which we bombed. My love affair with music continued, however.

I became serious about the guitar when I went to live with Dad in high school. He had a tan electric-acoustic Takamine that I would sneakily play. I couldn’t help it. But Dad encouraged me to play and told me to listen to his vinyl records to learn how to play on key by ear as he could. I also got guitar lessons briefly, though I mostly taught myself to play through tablature, a Buddy Guy blues guitar book, and listening to Albert King. When Dad took me to a mall to buy my first CD at fourteen, I picked out Albert King. Dad asked, “Why would you buy that out of all the music?” “I can hear all of the other stuff on the radio,” I replied. Dad played in church, and listening to him play influenced my beginning understanding of the guitar. Dad played mostly jazz and gospel, but blues bit me early. Blues made me feel something. It felt like playing gospel but more wild. I was told that playing the guitar in church was for the Lord, but playing blues felt like it was for myself. Blues guitar allowed me to say something, to express pain and sorrow, to completely get lost in the feeling of freedom without guilt. Blues made feel joy. Blues could hold my despair. It would calm me and welcome me.

The blues, the beauty mixed with the tragedy, are what keeps me up at night and has made me question God. Even as a child, when I looked at Austin beyond the church walls, I could see that we hadn’t reached the promised land. I questioned if the American Dream was the dream for us. The American Dream seemed to happen in the white suburbs where I lived with Dad. I ain’t see no American Dream on Chicago Avenue in Austin. I saw hope and love and sacrifice. We knew our neighbors, fed each other, and cried and laughed together; my stints in the suburbs never offered me that. I often felt isolated in the burbs. I still feel separated and disconnected from community as an adult, now miles from Austin. My Blackness is a threat in the burbs. The burbs are where I witnessed the racist shit—the othering that I would grow accustomed to bearing. I stopped rapping temporarily and began playing the guitar in church, in my room, whenever I needed a friend. Blues felt like a haven.

As I age, I long for Chicago blues: the repetition, bass, rhythm guitar, and drums. In slow blues, the longing and the sorrow, the constant can go slow and steady. I’ve played rhythm guitar, bass, and simple shuffles on drums, but I have always loved to riff over the constant with lead guitar. Improvisation in blues is still confined to the notes in that key—the constraints. But how you improvise over that melody is spiritual—a reimagining over the constant. You can pluck and stomp on frets with fingers like church shouts and preachers stepping on the devils—on the constant legacy of enslavement—racism—the slow steady bass line that changes pitch but never dissipates. The constant in Austin is mass incarceration, War on Drugs policies, over-policing, and police brutality. The slow, repetitious bass line was my friends and family lost in crack addiction and thrown in prison. The Chicago blues is divestment in Austin, food deserts, and lack of Black ownership in the community. Blues is redlining us to death. Blackness is the stomping, the improvisation, the refusal, the resilience, the creativity, the unexpected—the guitar riffs. Improvisation is summer block parties, Fred Hampton, backyard barbecues, house music, footwork, Jesse White Tumblers, icy cups, and Grandma’s garden.

I’ve been looking for freedom in blues riffs on guitar since age fourteen. As a teenager, I played at our family church, for the first time alongside Dad. In most churches, I was a contradiction in the tradition of submissiveness and patriarchy, a dance that felt like soul contortion. Dad played more jazzy. The blues, the devil’s music, are what I brought into the church because maybe the blues were a good fit for me. Maybe I was more like my grandma—a blues woman. Who ain’t been called the devil, or at least treated like one? White folks, Christian folks, used the Bible to call us devils, to enslave us, to impose white supremacy and perpetuate the constant, even against the Black Holy-Ghost-sanctified saints.

In my twenties in the mid-2000s, I looked for freedom in Andersonville on the North Side of Chicago. Andersonville was the first time I lived outside of Austin and North Lawndale. I saw there were two different cities then—that Chicago was much more than what my family had been confined to for decades. I had also been told that the North Side was “for the gays”—the evil my churchgoing family spoke about often. I decided to move back to Chicago to pursue my art, production, and music.

After flunking out, I was determined to figure out what I wanted and who I was. So I began a process Lorde calls  “unsilencing.” In Sister Outsider, Lorde writes, “For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” But I didn’t know Lorde at the time. I just felt the need to “turn my silence into language and action,” as Lorde writes.

The ghosts chased me to Andersonville, however. I learned that some things you just can’t run away from. Escaping and finding freedom became a blur of high and low notes that I tried to regulate by running and numbing. I ran from flunking out. I tried to numb the anxiety and debilitating panic attacks that had started my junior year of college, probably stemming from self-hate and homophobia, and feeling like I couldn’t live up to anyone’s expectations. I tried to quiet the professor’s voice during office hours telling me that the only reason I was accepted to journalism school was because of my dad. I walked around like I could feel the eternity of fiery flames that I had been taught would be my fate in the church. That heat was hell, but here on Earth. I was taught that the answer to most of my trauma was in church, and again, I was running away from that ghost.

If you like this excerpt from Rasheena Fountain's book Starfish Blues: A Memoir, released April 22, 2026, it is available to order.

You are invited to Rasheena Fountain's book celebration May 14 at Underbelly in Seattle and her book signing May 23 at Barnes & Noble Northgate Station in Seattle!