Grown Men Cry: Blues Song Guide

"Grown Men Cry" was written by Louisiana blues singer-songwriter Larry Garner and recorded by Chicago blues harmonica player Billy Branch, appearing as the second track on Branch's 1995 solo album The Blues Keep Following Me Around, released on Verve/Gitanes Jazz Productions. The track runs roughly four and a half minutes and was Branch's first full solo album after years as a prominent sideman and bandleader on the Chicago blues scene, recorded with backing from guitarist Carl Weathersby.

Billy Branch is widely regarded as one of the leading torchbearers of post-Little Walter Chicago blues harmonica playing, having come up through the city's blues clubs in the 1970s and gone on to lead his long-running band the Sons of Blues. The Blues Keep Following Me Around mixed original material, including "Grown Men Cry," with covers drawn from blues forebears such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf, situating Branch's own songwriting directly within that lineage rather than apart from it.

The song's title pushes back against a familiar piece of folk wisdom, the idea that grown men do not cry, and reclaims open grief as something the blues has always made room for. That is, in many ways, the blues' founding emotional premise: a genre built explicitly around giving voice to pain that other forms of popular music, and other social expectations around masculinity, have historically asked men to suppress. Larry Garner, the song's writer, built much of his own songwriting career around exactly this kind of plainspoken emotional honesty, often addressing everyday hardship and vulnerability directly rather than through blues' more oblique traditional metaphors.

Branch's recording of "Grown Men Cry" is a good example of how working Chicago blues musicians in the 1990s were still writing fresh original material squarely within the tradition, rather than only performing older standards, keeping the genre's emotional range expanding even as its commercial visibility narrowed.

Stream "Grown Men Cry" through Billy Branch's official artist pages on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Continue back to Going to Build Me a Playhouse, and explore the rest of the catalog at our blues music guide.