_With a name on her like Gloria Hallelujah Woods, the woman was destined to be a prophet. Certainly the twenty-five-year-old Leo sun and Memphis rap queen GloRilla came to tell the good news, the gospel of Memphis. That good news is that Black folks can and will persist through the unimaginable with a shining, gold-tooth joy that survives Pharaohs, Judases, and Pharisees alike. Glo is a new prophet for a familiar blues, that sonic and spiritual testament to the creative intelligence and resilience of working people under the crushing conditions of chattel slavery, convict leasing, chain gangs, sharecropping, factory and warehouse work, and the modern service economy. Outside of Memphis, and outside of the South, Glo’s magnetism has been her distinctiveness, her inimitability, as people marvel at her accent, her worldview, her philosophy, her spirit. At home, we recognize her easily as a prophet of the people, as a unique amalgam of all we are and all we have been, these blues people descendants making an ecstatic life on the Mississippi River.

GloRilla is especially anointed. She ascended in public consciousness right before the previous generation’s Leo sun and Memphis rap queen prophet Gangsta Boo transitioned to the sainthood, becoming Our Lady of Memphis Lola. Glo’s hits—“F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” “Tomorrow,” “Yeah Glo!,” and more—are timeless pronouncements, verses believers will cite and return to for centuries. Like Three 6 Mafia sampled Stax and other Southern soul outfits, archiving the sounds they came of age with, so, too, does Glo smartly archive and signify on Memphis rap of the previous generation. Her social media moniker, GloRilla Pimp, signifies on Project Pat’s “Gorilla Pimp”; her “Yeah Glo!” is a signification on the popular Three 6 Mafia chant “yeah ho”; her production is heavy on the crunk and relentless on the bass; and her album covers are deliberate throwbacks to Houston’s Brauch brothers’ Pen & Pixel designs. Memphis rap has been widely and near-rampantly sampled by folks outside of the city. Now Glo continues the tradition of sampling from home, becoming a master signifier, as blues people tend to be.

The late geographer Clyde Woods talked about the blues as a critique of plantation power, and moreover as a complex system for the transmission of the folk knowledge, which we might today call street or hood sense, that informed and raised the spirit in the most impossible circumstances. This is an embodied, lived, inherited folk knowledge, kept with breath and bone through myths, tales, riddles, and songs. There’s an intertwining of flesh, spirit, dirt, land, labor, and capital that shapes the blues worldview, the blues experience, which exists on the lower frequencies in the private spaces and interiority of Black life. To see Glo and not be familiar with this experience, or to have buried it in exchange for whatever post-Black shoes are the rage today, is to be perplexed. To see Glo and to have lived it, just there beyond the curtain, is to recognize and know. She is the latest in a line of blues prophets from Memphis whose crackling audacity of spirit and flesh have sung about life beyond the field, the factory, the fast-food cooktop, the logistics conveyor belt.

Consider the place of Memphis, this apex destination of blues people, this shipping capital of the nation, a spiritual center where the dark prevails just a bit more, in the landscape of American and global sound: ground zero for blues and gospel, an outpost for country, jazz, and rock & roll, the unequivocal soul capital, center of ineffable cool in hip-hop. This is a people-powered place, often functioning without the institutional and industrial supports of other cities, repressed economically and socially under a biracial regime determined to keep Black people, its statistical majority, subjugated. Folks like to describe the city’s most globally impactful sound, the Stax sound, as gritty, earthy, and raw, especially in comparison to the perfectly flipped wigs and pristine suits of Detroit’s Motown. While there are surely objectively observable differences between the labels, rather than interpreting them through the ready-made regional class lens of “South = poor, authentic and North = rich, fake,” or asserting that there must be something in the river water, there is something more telling in the socioeconomic conditions enabling and constraining the making of the music. This is why the blues, as a way of being, an ontology, a worldview, is the only way to understand the Memphis that Glo has come to tell about.

Glo brings us the good news from north of North Memphis, from the community of Frayser, called the Bay. Frayser is nearly an island, bordered by the Mississippi, Wolf, and Loosahatchie Rivers, with a railroad track on another side. With its beautiful river views, it was once a summer home community for the white wealthy, then a bedroom community for the white middle classes, and then a striving community of Black workers and middle classes as whites left after desegregation. It was soon a postindustrial community, as major factories in and near Frayser, International Harvester and Firestone, closed in the early 1980s. The eighth of ten children, Glo came to earth at the end of the second millennium, into a Frayser still reeling from the effects of deindustrialization and city disinvestment, but still about two decades from the arrival of Amazon’s fulfillment center there.

The table certainly has been set for her arrival by Memphis rap women, from Princess Loko to La Chat to Our Lady of Memphis Lola, to her crew of rap friends: Slimeroni, K Carbon, Aleza, and Gloss Up. Across the region, artists like Houston’s Megan Thee Stallion, with whom she toured last spring, Atlanta’s Latto, and Miami’s City Girls have opened the space for Glo. And from New York, collaborator Cardi B has offered a coveted nod of recognition. In an industry that thrives on exploitation and competition, this is the kind of internal community care characteristic of the blues tradition. Whether it was Sister Rosetta Tharpe inviting a young Little Richard to the stage to sing in Georgia or the Burnsides and other Hill Country artists in North Mississippi creating space for each other to shine, artists in the tradition, like all Black folks, have long understood that in the confines of economies that aim to gobble us up, bones and all, intentional care for each other is required to stay paid and in one piece. It’s a kind of care that Gangsta Boo and Nicki Minaj—because of the gendered isolation of male-driven labels and the overarching racism and sexism of an industry that refused to fathom more than one woman hip-hop artist at a time—did not have access to. In some ways, then, this is a new day.

In other ways, Glo is singing about the same trials that women have had for generations, and it is no coincidence that the prophet at this moment in time is a woman. There’s the delicious anthem “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” that celebrates freedom from a no-count, cheating-ass man, turning murderous blues heartbreak lamentations like Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” into public celebration. There are odes to her sexual prowess peppered throughout Glo’s oeuvre, though as much as people across genders like to clutch their proverbial pearls, none are on par in their explicitness with the still-reigning blues queen of sexual braggadocio Lucille Bogan.

But there are also the gestures toward issues more serious than infidelity. Intimate partner violence against women in Memphis continues unabated and is rising. Everyone knows a young woman in the city who has been killed or maimed by a current or former partner, and everyone knows a woman currently in a violent relationship. So when Glo raps “my cousin in a toxic situation / need to free her” on “Blessed,” we hear her preaching, and we recognize, and we remember our cousins, friends, mothers, and Bessie Smith’s “Outside of That.” And this continued increase in intimate partner violence is occurring in tandem with childbearing generations being subjected to some of the most restrictive abortion policies in our lifetime. In Tennessee, there is essentially a total ban on abortion, and people seeking reproductive health care often must travel two and three states away. In a city with so few economic opportunities, an education system hijacked by the state, and a history and current reality of dismal maternal and infant mortality rates, this is a gendered oppression that is tantamount to murder. Again, a subversive reading of Bessie Smith is instructive, in this case her “Young Woman’s Blues.” Awakening to find that her man has abandoned her and his responsibilities, the narrator’s mind seems already made up: “I’m a young woman and ain’t done runnin’ ’round.” Glo, too, in coded and not so coded ways, calls on people to exercise their reproductive autonomy where possible, and especially in situations where they won’t be economically supported by a partner. She offers her strategy for not being trapped by gold-digging men in her April interview with Shannon Sharpe on his show Club Shay Shay, and in the refrain on “Wanna Be,” she definitively directs today’s young women with the blues to not tether themselves to a man who doesn’t want to be a father. Echoing across time and space, this is blueswomen’s feminism and theory in action.

Like that of her predecessor Our Lady of Memphis Lola, Glo’s message is welcomed across genders, with men bumping her equally alongside Duke Deuce and Young Dolph. Her deeply pitched rap voice and femme tomboy bravado seem to compel men to accept her realness; still, it’s especially aimed at working-class and working-poor women. In Memphis, such women are often denied access to middle-class presentations of femininity, in part because of the kinds of labor they perform, and in part because of the necessities of surviving as girl children in houses and neighborhoods full of men. Many of us grew up fighting boys for our bodies and our dignity. Some of us grew up fighting boys and men, colored purple like Sofia all our lives. If one doesn’t have the capacity to listen beyond the contours, it might sound like the usual rap bombast and bravado. But hear this reality for Black girls in Memphis, for Black girls all over, the bared teeth of resistance, of bite back and sometimes shoot back, of the red silences being spoken around, in Glo’s message.

Witness Glo’s Afrofuturist homage to working women and to her own working history in the video for this year’s single “Yeah Glo!” from her Ehhthang Ehhthang mixtape. In it, the current Glo pulls up on herself in various formulations. She returns to her childhood self and friends in Frayser, giving out money, which the girls give to smiling grandmothers in lawn chairs. She pulls up on herself working a fast-food drive-thru, her future self perhaps inspiring her past self to quit the dead-end job, as she shoves her apron at the manager and leaves. She pulls up on herself incarcerated, offering words of encouragement for intrusive thoughts: “stop overthinking / these hoes can’t fuck with you.” She also appears as a limo driver, as a car washer, and as a woman in a beautifully appointed living room watching herself accept an award for artist of the year. Underneath the easy, familiar blues bass, there is something clever and revelatory in her inhabiting a variety of working women’s positions. It’s a reminder that we, working people, are always the ones we have been waiting for.

Gloria Hallelujah Woods has come forward to sing the blues of our time, to sing about the working people that power Memphis and the world. Most importantly, she is a reminder that we have survived, we have endured, and we will continue to do so, with an unmatched wit, spirit, and bass. Hallelujah and amen.

This story was published in the print edition as “Gloria, Hallelujah.”  Subscribe to the Oxford American with our year-end, limited-time deal here. Buy the issue this article appears in here: print and digital.