Nationally-noted Minneapolis-based folk artist Chastity Brown, a Black queer woman, spent most of her life certain she didn’t deserve joy.
Growing up in Union City, Tennessee, a city “with four or five stoplights and a Super Walmart,” Brown harbored hardships. At the age of seven, her father died. She remembers: “losing my father at a young age and then growing up in a home that wasn’t safe created a kind of sadness in me.” These hardships created an atmosphere where she determined from an early age, “I must deserve the worst.” She believed, “These things [hardships] hurt so bad that they would just be a part of my makeup.”
However, life in Union City was not joyless. Her father was a blues artist who would rehearse Fats Domino songs in their basement for his blues band. Brown’s brother told her a story about before her father’s death: “I was really young… [I] would lie underneath our dad’s grand piano and just press my feet to the belly of it and just stay under there like the whole rehearsal.”
She remembers her siblings playing an important role in her musical upbringing: “I just wanted to copy them.” She first encountered the guitar when she was 15 and “wanted to throw up [with] compulsion,” and began to “fiddle around with it endlessly.”
Between lingering joylessness and music, she broke onto the music scene with her 2012 album, “Back-Road Highways.” Her hit song, “After You,” earned her recognition from The Current and BBC; it was also featured in the movie, “Martha & Maria.” She narrates, “I’ve written a lot about… emotional pain,” and still carried an overbearing emotional weight of being a Black queer woman alongside success.
In 2019, before writing her most recent album, “Sing to the Walls,” she consulted with elders. She says, “I remember this elder saying to me, joy is a possibility.” She recalls “saying to her, ‘I don’t believe you.’” The thought of allowing herself joy was inconceivable.
In 2020, the pandemic hit. Brown recalls, “I was so full of fear at that time for a number of reasons, like George Floyd and the pandemic.” Her identities as a Black woman were under attack. Alongside this, one of her longtime friends was diagnosed with cancer. During this time, she read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and was astonished by Zora Neale Hurston’s audacity of “writing a love story that’s clearly within the time of slavery,” saying it “just blew my mind.” After reading the novel, “It clicked. [I realized] joy might be a choice.” She realized, “Joy might be something to look for.”
During the pandemic, Brown fell in love. She describes, “being in love as a juxtaposition to our city being on fire, and just was so poignant to me.” Love in a societally loveless moment. The moment was dichotomous of light and darkness. She recalls, “I really needed something that felt jubilant.”
Soon, she began writing her seventh album, “Sing to the Walls,” in a moment of anguish and newfound joy. She says, “For that record, I wanted to explore. I had never considered joy as a way to live.” “During the pandemic, I wrote ferociously” because “I had more than enough time to fiddle in the studio and write songs and record them,” she says. During this time, she wrote over 100 songs; only ten made it to the album. Two of her songs with grand depth on the record are “Sing to the Walls” and “Loving the Questions.”
“Loving the Questions” was the hardest song to write. Brown describes, “It was a year and a half of returning and returning and returning again to that song,” because “It seemed literally impossible to love the questions during a global pandemic.” She continues, “There are no answers in that moment, and any answer wouldn’t suffice,” as fear of the future was so prevalent. Writing was laborious: “I had to be really patient.” One and a half years of intermittent work about joy of uncertainty in a time of terrifying uncertainty culminated in a four-minute and 23-second song.
“Sing to the Walls” was the song that she felt encapsulated the album’s emotion of joyful love against all odds, encapsulated by “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Brown says, “[in a way it’s] a love song.” The song “recogni[zes] that we all have walls that we put up around ourselves… to not be hurt, not be seen, not be made fun of.” It is the story of “an individual seeing another person with all… [their flaws] and loving them anyway.” It accepts blemishes and chooses to love them. Through the song, she messages, “I will sing to all the ways in which you try to hide. I will sing to all the mechanisms that you use to hide… I will sing to whatever I need to sing to get to you.”
Now, Brown interacts with joy differently: “It seems similar to working out, eating well, drinking water” in that “I don’t have to do those things, but it seems like it would be good for your body.” It is a habit, something not required yet beneficial. She believes, even in the uncertain social landscape of 2025 America and the history of her traumatic childhood, “Joy is possible even in the midst of pain and fear.” For everyone, joy is a dynamic relationship. From living the majority of life believing, “I must deserve the worst,” she now knows, “I have a right to claim my joy.”
