10/12/2026
Day 11 of 31 Days of Hoodoo :🎶 Hoodoo, Griots & the Power of Music🖤
Music has always been more than entertainment in the black community; it has been a vessel for resistance, spirituality, and survival. In many West African cultures, griots served as historians, storytellers, genealogists, and musicians who were known to preserve ancestral knowledge and histories through oral tradition. Enslaved Africans carried those same musical traditions, spiritual knowledge, and storytelling practices into America. From here those practices evolved and were preserved under the conditions of slavery and oppression.
In Hoodoo, music, rhythm, and song have also held spiritual significance. Spirituals, work songs, blues, hollers, and other Black musical traditions carried coded messages, expressed grief and resistance, strengthened bonds, and sometimes accompanied prayer and spiritual workings. Many griot traditions and Hoodoo are distinct and they intersect through the preservation of ancestral memory, oral knowledge, and the use of sound. That said, these as a means of cultural survival.
The beauty of it is the music carries stories, and those stories carry the people who came before us, and connects us to those who come after. Most modern practitioners have playlists, songs or hymns they sing while they do their workings. It’s a streamline of ancestral knowledge