Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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This has been the heritage of a people who for hundreds of years could not celebrate birth or dignify death and whose need to live despite the dehumanizing pressures of slavery developed an endless capacity for laughing at their painful experiences. The front free endpaper has pencil inscriptions and a line of text on the copyright page has been crossed out with black marker ink. He appears to be attracted to the blues for what he believes they tell us of the sociology of Negro American identity and attitude.

For it would seem that while Negroes have been undergoing a process of “Americanization” from a time preceding the birth of this nation—including the fusing of their blood lines with other non-African strains, there has persisted a stubborn confusion as to their American identity.

Understanding contemporary black music for Baraka meant locating it as part of a long and complicated struggle, one between the dominant forces of Western modernity and a black countertradition that had often been derided and suppressed. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen’s music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the bombing of the Birmingham church that resulted in the deaths of four black girls and the passing of W. The only questions it will properly move to answer have, I think, been answered already within the patterns of American life.

I'm probably making this sound way more complicated than J/B does, so just ignore me and go read it. When I was younger I remember people saying that black people had a natural talent for music and dancing and being emotionally “soulful” and sexually uninhibited.When they were sung professionally in theaters they were entertainment, when danced to in the form of recordings or used as a means of transmitting the traditional verses and their wisdom, they were folklore.

At one point he tells us that “the one peculiar reference to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to ‘citizenship’ is in his music.not, as he gives it, “a slave” but most probably a coachman, a teamster, a cook, the best damned steward on the Mississippi, the best jockey in Kentucky, a butler, a farmer, a stud, or, hopefully, a free man! If you’re new to our story: we are singing and performing our truth and talents — as real-life “Blues People” — and Black creatives preserving America’s Original Music!

Before he became the voice of black nationalist poetry, a young man named Amiri Baraka wrote a book that, while still widely read, deserves to be a primer for understanding the evolution of pop music. It stands to portray that where initially the newer innovations made in jazz music are derided and given little appreciation, they are in time shelved and then rediscovered to be given their glory in the future.The trumpeter and composer Russell Gunn will premiere “The Blues and Its People,” a suite inspired by Baraka’s influential text, to mark its 60th anniversary. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine.