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With that introduction to Blues music, Mr. Coogler exposed how the Protestant ethic placed upon African Americans manufactured a struggle within Black folk to accept that music is the tool that announces our secular struggles while declaring our spiritual strivings simultaneously, to secure our humanity—through the conflict of a preacher father and his Blues playing son.

Ever since German sociologist Max Weber penned his classic 1905 book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," the Western World has accepted that Calvinist-influenced societies tend to associate hard work with both virtue and material success.

American capitalism has come a long way since Max Weber, roughly 120 years ago, argued that it epitomized a “Protestant ethic,” which sanctified savings, investment and other productivity-enhancing deferrals of gratification.

In his study “Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,” the literary scholar James R. Kincaid writes: “Alger may have felt he was inculcating a Protestant ethic, but he seems to have exploited instead a pedophilic fairy tale, a narrative that runs at least as deep in America as Puritanism. It’s not hard work that brings success but being cute, cute in the presence of susceptible adults.”

Then, summoning the underdog spirit of Rocky Balboa and the Protestant ethic of Max Weber, he says: “I don’t forget those steps that it took for me to get here. So even though I got a family and I got all these commercials and these endorsements, I don’t forget the thing that makes all of those things possible. Which is the work, the discipline.”