Leave Your Love in Greater Hands: A Blues Meditation on Surrender

For J.B. Hutto, and for those of us learning to entrust the unspeakable.

06.14.25 Los Angeles, CA 6:27 a.m.

I woke up this morning feeling the blues, and there’s a song by bluesman J.B. Hutto called “Leave Your Love in Greater Hands.” I never tried to sing along to it, because I never could figure out the words. You won’t find the lyrics, because they don’t exist- at least not in any formal registry of printed language on the web and all music platforms. I’ve searched high and low. You probably have too, if you’ve stumbled across the song and found yourself stopped, breath caught somewhere in your chest, the way a body forgets logic when it recognizes something deeper than understanding.

The lyrics seem to have vanished into the crackle of old speakers, into the hum of a Brooklyn night, into the sonic grain of his voice that feels like a half shout, half moan, but wholly human. But listen to the recording, and what you hear isn’t particularly clear. It’s vibration, resonance, breath. He doesn't so much sing the song as exhale it through rusted bottleneck steel and raw, reverent pain. You catch syllables like ghosts in the attic. You lean in, trying to transcribe a truth that refuses to be pinned down.

Hutto sings like he’s been crying all night- like the guitar is both weapon and wound. And yet, for all its distortion and dissonance, the song offers something like peace. Not the pristine kind. Not closure. But the peace that lives on the other side of relinquishing.

The words, if you can catch a stanza here and there, are mumbled under the swagger of the slide guitar, buried inside the barbed-wire rasp of Hutto’s soulful voice. You don’t hear them so much as you feel them. And maybe that’s the point.

Sometimes the blues doesn’t tell you the story- it becomes the story, and I come back to it. Often.

J.B. Hutto, born Joseph Benjamin Hutto in Blackville, South Carolina in 1926, was one of those bluesmen who never quite fit the mold, which is probably why his music stays with you. His father was a preacher, and like so many blues artists of his generation, Hutto began in the church.

The sacred and the profane were not opposite poles- they were neighbors, sharing a kitchen table. After moving to Chicago in the 1940s, Hutto started playing in street corner bands before pausing his musical career, and for a time, his will to play, following a bar room brawl when a woman shattered Hutto’s guitar over her husband’s head. He worked as a janitor in a funeral home. Imagine that- spending your days mopping grief off the linoleum, wondering if your voice would ever matter again.

And yet he returned. Because the blues has always been a language of return of prodigal sons and daughters finding their way back, but never to the same place. Always changed. Always stripped of illusions. And maybe that’s what makes the blues sacred- not just the lament, but the comeback.

In the late 1950s, he returned with fire and slide guitar ferocity, recording for labels like Chance and Delmark, becoming the frontman of his band, The Hawks. His style was smoldering, raw, electric, and blistering. Where Muddy was smooth and Buddy Guy theatrical, Hutto was almost confrontational in his authenticity- pushing the bottleneck down the strings like he was trying to dislodge the devil and exorcise it. The music essentially delivers a resonance of purification, at least for me.

“Leave Your Love in Greater Hands.” The title alone is a sermon. It suggests a kind of faith and a kind of knowing- not in a specific God necessarily, but in a force that can carry what we cannot. That can hold what would otherwise break us.

And then I think about the love I’ve had to place into those hands- the kind I didn’t want to let go of. The kind I couldn’t fix. The kind that didn’t choose me back. The kind I didn’t want back. I think about motherhood, about the ways we raise children not to keep them, but to send them forward into a world we cannot control. About how I have had to entrust parts of myself- my labor, my tenderness, my vulnerability, my story- into the uncertain space of legacy.

And still, I return to the music. To Hutto’s voice, barely decipherable, yet more legible than anything written. The guitar slides up and down like a soul pacing the hallway, deciding whether to stay or walk out into the night. The words blend into the music and the music blends into itself. No real chorus, no real rhyme. Just a resonance reminding us that what you love, you may not always understand. What you love, you may not be able to save. But you can offer it up and surrender it. And in doing so, you become free.

There’s something profoundly real and profoundly human in that notion- of holding love in a space so deeply that you know when to let it go. Not into the void, not into indifference, but into something larger than yourself. Greater hands. Some days I believe that’s music itself. On other days, I believe it’s time. Or the ancestors. Or the wind. Or the mystery. Whatever it is that catches the pieces when we drop them.

J.B. Hutto died in 1983, just shy of 57, but you can still hear him if you listen hard enough. Not in the charts, not in the textbooks, but in the warble of a steel slide, in the hush between verses, in the spiritual exhaustion and power of the blues that doesn’t explain- it insists.

Maybe that's why the lyrics don't exist on paper. Maybe they're not supposed to. Maybe the song was never meant to be recited, only received- like communion passed down through calloused fingers and bent necks, through unspoken memory and heat.

That’s the secret heartbeat of the blues. The blues is not about possession. It is about release. Not having the words, but feeling them anyway. Not resolution, but reverence. I may never find the lyrics to that song. But I’ve come to realize I don’t need to. They’ve already found me.

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
- James Baldwin -

You can listen to it here: Leave Your Love in Greater Hands

*J.B. Hutto 1926-1983 / *Images are not mine