This exclusive feature is a part of the OA's Country Roots: Web Edition, an online extension of our annual music issue. Order the Country Roots Music Issue and companion CD here. 

This debut music video from musician Tomás Doncker and poet Yusef Komunyakaa, and in collaboration with visual artist Floyd D. Tunson, is intended as a face-to-face project where the artists and their respective disciplines converge.  As Doncker tells Larry Kay in our print issue: "We mine the common ground which all of this music came from... and try to write new chapters that read like old texts."

Of this video, Doncker says: "In Our Blood is a mediation on the predisposed limitations imposed on the black man's purpose and existence in American society. It's about the metaphorical cages we're placed in with regards to what we're capable of and what we're allowed, what permissions should be given to us to contribute to culture as whole."

The Mercy Suite (20th Anniversary Edition) is available here and on all online music platforms.