In his 1964 book of essays Shadow and Act, novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that "[t]he tremendous burden of sociology, which Jones would place upon this body of music, is enough to give even the blues the blues. Blues People is not only a fresh, incisively instructive reinterpretation of negro music in America, but it is also crucially relevant to negro-white relationships today - NAT HENTOFF You may also be interested in.

Jones would take his subject seriously—as the best of jazz critics have always done—and he himself should be so taken. Their earliest experiences, work songs, field hollers and spirituals incubated and invented the musical genres known as “blues” and “jazz. Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. Baraka attacked white critics for pretending that all music was equal, that it could be evaluated in isolation from the cultural needs of the community that created it. Blues, jazz, soul, and funk have all fully entered the white American songbook, and hip-hop, while it's been slow getting there, is on its way.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. Blues People outlined a black experience in sound, and it marked the beginning of LeRoi Jones' social and personal metamorphosis. But what, one might ask, of those moments when he feels his metabolism aroused by the rising of the sap in spring?

He wrote a social history of African-Americans in the USA through the prism of music or---maybe on the principle of red and yellow tile floors (are they red with yellow designs or yellow with red designs ? Bessie Smith might have been a “blues queen” to the society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues were part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man’s ability to deal with chaos.J.-born, African-American, Lower East Side-based Beat poet — published a book titled Blues People: a panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music. Anyone, particularly from outside the USA, who wants to know the history of African-American music within its social environment ought still to read BLUES PEOPLE. The back of the dust jacket is white and features a blurb from Ian Christie of the Sunday Telegraph about Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, as well as the publisher’s information. At times Blues People veers a bit farther than I'd have liked towards academic abstruseness, and certain chapters will be pretty slow going if you⁠—like me⁠—haven't brushed up recently on the meanings of music theory terms like "polyrhythmic" or "contrapuntal. Here, middle-classness is the ultimate marker of cultural inauthenticity, because the black middle class, according to Baraka, dedicated itself to assimilation.

It's not quite that straightforward, of course, which Baraka acknowledges, but I think his general thesis holds true, and it can be applied to pretty much all subsequent popular music in America. The point I want to make most evident here is that I cite the beginning of the blues as one beginning of American Negroes.

Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.

Read as a record of an earnest young poet-critic’s attempt to come to grips with his predicament as Negro American during a most turbulent period of our history. It's not really a musical history of the jazz/blues, so anyone looking for lots of discussion of musical theory and the compositional development of those styles will probably need to look elsewhere. He discusses the notes to, and music within, 1960s albums by soul jazz tenor saxophonists like Willis “Gatortail” Jackson and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis. He is depicted in profile, from the shoulders up, facing the right edge of the book and he is singing. Spellman says a 2013 version of Blues People would naturally be different, but the focus on black experiences would remain.A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music — LANGSTON HUGHES A panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music . This, Baraka argues, is because jazz was the first truly black genre which was still broadly accessible enough that white people could understand and perform it with at least a tenuous degree of authenticity. This split was pronounced even at the 1963 March on Washington, where SNCC chairman John Lewis hoped openly to criticize the Kennedy administration and threaten a “nonviolent revolution,” “a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us victory”—but then was pressured by King and more moderate civil rights leaders to revise his text. Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements.