Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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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! After taking the NY-metro area by storm for 3 years with their incredible shows and musicianship, the band recently won the North Jersey Blues Society International Blues Challenge… and are now heading to Memphis in January to showcase alongside some of the best blues bands from around the world! When he first read Amiri Baraka’s epochal study “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” originally published in 1963, Russell Gunn felt that he already understood, on some level, the book’s urgent themes.

I don't even consider this book non fiction since so much is theory, so how can this be a "definitive book of blues history"? The blues might be understood both as folklore and as entertainment, depending on the context; commercial and noncommercial types of music are difficult to disentangle, when the same song might be performed on a stage for money or sung to children for love. As for the author, Baraka himself notes with satisfaction that the music and culture of "blues people" enjoys a wider influence in the 21st century than it did in 1963. Blues People is a brilliant and path-breaking book, not because all of its factual information is correct, or because all of its interpretive perspectives are unassailable, but because of the sheer audacity, scope and originality of its interpretive perspective," she wrote.Granted, I come from a knowledge base primarily focused on Brazil, Afro-Brazilian culture, and the African diaspora as Find the self, then kill it”: such was Baraka’s prescription for a more vibrant black music and a more vital black community, and he began with himself. Technique was then, as today, the key to creative freedom, but before this came a will toward expression. Para ello el autor toma como punto de partida el momento crucial en que el esclavo africano nacido en américa da origen al negro africano. 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.

This edition has the same cover image as the hardcover (NOT the one that ABE has added to this description, which is the newer edition). Even more than the blues, which seem to interest Baraka more as an embodied attitude than as a codified genre, jazz is the battlefield upon which he sees the war for America's musical spirit being waged most fiercely and revealingly. Seminal work from playwright, poet, critic and activist LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, in which the author traces the influence of jazz and blues on white America, not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music.

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. He begins from the Africans who came to North America as slaves bearing very different cultures, confronted by an absolutely different view of the world emanating from their new masters. Despite the fact that it was written a full 15 years before a rapper first stepped into the studio, Baraka seems to have anticipated it with his analysis of jazz. Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre. 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.