Growing up Black in the United States—especially the South—can be bittersweet.

You know the Pledge of Allegiance by heart years before anyone teaches that you were 3/5ths a person.

You’re a whole adult before you discover that the creeks, lakes, and backwaters of your childhood were the same ones that drowned your ancestors.

And God forbid you ever walk into an antique store where if you’re lucky, the worst thing staring back is Aunt Jemima.

By her teenage years, Tennessee native Amythyst Kiah had her own tiny revelation. The OTHER kids in her predominantly white Chattanooga suburb listened to whatever they wanted without anyone batting a lash. But it was “weird that I like Blink-182 or Green Day,” two of the best-selling American rock bands of all time.

Adulthood and experience gave Amythyst the words for that moment we all arrive at, no matter how we get there: “I’m a person of color regardless of what my socioeconomic status was, regardless of what I did in school or how I dressed or what I listened to.”

“Black Myself” takes ownership of that story across generations.

Presented in black and white, there’s an immediate, intentional timelessness to the scenes behind Amythyst’s distinctive Rockabilly growl.

The song hits just as starkly. The opening bars are a full introduction to the queer Black southern woman who is Amythyst Kiah, complete with shocking southern candor.

Watch and you’ll understand why she’s not asking for permission to exist. From jump, her tone sounds more like a dare to bother this good lady who might have something in her boot.

The song’s lyrics detail an array of limitations, stereotypes, and fears Black Southern women are born into. But through a historical, ancestral and personal journey, Amythyst steps into her power by the last verse “stand[ing] proud and free, because I’m Black myself.”

And although this is her own very Black American story, it holds a even greater human truth.

This talent, this tone, and this power? This is what happens when blood on the roots makes its way to bloom.

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