Blues People: Negro Music in White America

This book is probably the greatest ever written on the early history of black music in America. With rare clarity and glowing intensity, Baraka traces the evolution of black forms such as blues and jazz back to Africa, and presents the reader with genuine insight into the world of the creators of these important 20th century art forms. The book is as gripping as any novel you will ever read, and also crammed with facts and mindboggling lines of thought. Anybody with even the slightest interest in modern black music needs to read this book, and consider its contents thoroughly.

Amiri Baraka (aka Leroy Jones) wrote a book about the move from Africa to slavery and from slavery to citizenship, and from "African to Negro" in his words. As music was the most profound artistic expression of this move, Baraka analyses each stage of social change through the music it produced.
As Baraka concentrates on the process, he does not put any emphasis on names and details of the musicians. The book is not in any way a list of "who's who in Blues or Jazz".
The book is critical of American mainstream culture, describing it as shallow and un-creative. Baraka observes that Blacks who have tried to belong to the mainstream (white) society have not been able to produce any music of value. He believes that their rejection of their Blues (slavery) roots made them too as shallow and un-creative as the society they wanted to join.
Baraka is most knowledgeable of Bebop and its developments up to free Jazz, as they are the closest to his generation. He is admittedly less connected to country blues, which for him expresses the first stage in the post slavery black society.
The book is magnificent in its originality and boldness. I think it is essential reading for anyone interested in African American music and/or culture.

The thing I enjoyed about this book was that it gave me a glimpse at how an angry black man viewed music and the culture related to it in 1963. It's definitely worth noting how race relations were viewed from that vantage back then and, of course, how that may apply to race relations today. As a summary of music history, the book is terrible though. It's so stilted with Jones' polarized opinions that it's hard to imagine it as accurate in any way whatsoever. He basically writes off everything that has anything to do with white people. He hates ragtime because it was influenced by European music. He only gives Bix Beiderbecke a slight nod, basically telling the reader that he was sorta kinda maybe okay... for a white person. He repeatedly degrades Benny Goodman--and the entire swing era for that matter--because he was white and could not possibly do the music justice as a result. Nevermind that Benny Goodman was Jewish and the son of poor immigrants who lost his father as a teenager. He claims that bebop wasn't influenced by European music at all, or that it was only indirectly if at all. In particular, talks about polyrhythms in bebop and how this concept was markedly non-Western. Then he notes that Stravinsky doesn't count, because he was just writing non-Western music... except that he was writing Western music. Apparently Ives didn't use polyrhythms before the 40s, you know, right before he died, and neither did Debussy for that matter. Nope, polyrhythms only existed in Africa and anyone else he used them either didn't exist or were influenced by music they never heard. But seriously, despite how much eye rolling this book caused in me, I greatly appreciate getting an idea of how someone so far removed from myself views the world.

The other day a friend rashly claimed that art and music were equally hard to describe in words. I asked him to tell me about a certain painting of Picasso's. He did, but claimed it wasn't accurate. "OK," I said, "you're right, but now tell me about Mozart's Jupiter Symphony." He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at me, and said, "Yeah, I see what you mean." Writing a book about the blues would be equally hard, it seems to me. So, LeRoi Jones did what he could, back in 1963, to tie the indescribable to the more concrete. 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 ?)---he wrote a book on African-American music through the prism of social history. It is one of the most important books on American music (and American society) that you can find. It has stood the test of time. 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. Here he tries to show how African music became transformed into African-AMERICAN music and then American. He continues then up through the generations of slavery, to Emancipation, migration to the cities, World War I, the Depression, World War II and the bebop age of the Fifties. The book is pre-Civil Rights movement, pre-Martin Luther King. Jones may have looked down on the NAACP and its allies as "white liberal supported organizations", I'm not sure, but they don't appear. The times are symbolized by the use of "Negro" throughout. I agree, the tome is dated, but don't reject it, don't pooh-pooh the man. This is a very intelligent, very worthwhile book. 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. He writes, "If Negro music can be seen to be the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world (and only ultimately about the ways in which music can be made), then the basic hypothesis of this book is understood." [p.153] Jones goes to great lengths to get to the bottom of those attitudes and thoughts.

My main criticism, apart from the fact that history dictates that we must be left a half century behind contemporary realities, is that though Jones obviously knew and loved the blues and jazz and all the various styles ( if not swing), his approach is coldly academic, highly dispassionate. He may criticize people who tried to make money, he may downplay all those who "abandoned" their roots, but my disappointment is that there is nothing of himself in the work barring a few mentions of his family. He does not share his enthusiasm. Music is beauty after all. I am sure he wanted the book to be taken as a serious essay, which it is. But in keeping himself removed from the discussion, being so analytic and professional in the style of the day, he has robbed us "readers of the future" of many insights.

African-American experience in the USA expressed itself most particularly in the blues, only later did that musical mode become part of the general American culture, often watered down, sometimes imitated by those who didn't wish to fit in or who wished to cash in. When conditions have changed, when the black middle class has entered mainstream America, and the urban underclass is wrapped up in hip-hop, gangsta rap culture, which is relentlessly commercialized by the powerful media, talking about the blues may seem a matter for historians or ethnomusicologists. Still, BLUES PEOPLE resonates strongly if we try to understand where we have been. As for where we are going---that old line sums it up---we're goin where the Southern cross the yella dog.

This is the single most important book that has been written about American popular music in the 20th century. Baraka argues that the blues is the music African America created to forge an identity as free men and women. From the blues came jazz, and jazz took many forms. It was also a music in which European Americans could find themselves, and so they adopted and adapted jazz for themselves. African Americans, in turn, created a new form of jazz (bebop) in order to have a form more authentically their own. While some of Jones' scholarship is weak and his analysis has problems, his statement of the black/white interaction is very important and has yet to be adequately investigated.

This is a very good insight in to the people from Africa who were sold as slaves and their journey as captives in a white world ..... It IS NOT a history of the blues ...... It IS a history of the people ....... while he does talk about "hollers and field chants", There is NO mention of the Delta or the Plantations or Charlie Patton or Robert Johnson or etc. .....
His main focus is on Jazz music, not blues .... He sentences often gone on and on and become a paragraph ..... and often do not provide continuity of the thought intended ......

While I have major reservations about a lot of Amiri Baraka's ideas and statements as expressed in his poetry and elsewhere, I have to acknowledge that Blues People is mostly excellent. 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.

What it is, is a social history of how black music both responded to and developed in relation to black culture and black self-perception from a time of bondage into an era where there was a nascent black middle class. Baraka's perspective is necessarily insular and dated, he's not interested in ideas of cross cultural assimilation/appropriation or multicultural influences (which to be honest, are concepts that didn't really fully develop in these kinds of analysis until decades after this was written). He is only interested in black people as they relate to themselves and as their music relates to them. Of course it's more or less common knowledge now that rock and roll and by extension almost all popular music in America is traced right back to the blues and the R&B that came out of it, but this is one of the books that took the trouble to really exhaustively point out that connection and to trace back its genealogy.

Beyond this, Baraka points out one of the most salient points of cultural musical analysis: a form or style is invented, disseminated, popularized, then at some point people get sick of it and change it into something new. That's a HUGE, brilliant observation. And with regards to popular music, its not a huge over-generalization to say that the people who are usually responsible for those transformations are almost always black. The ascendency of hip-hop/rap only bears that point out further. Someone really needs to write a version of Blues People for Hip-hop specifically and the musical sources and world it comes out of.

To be honest, the excellence of Blues People's analysis just makes Amiri Baraka seem even more problematic to me. How could someone capable of such a brilliant, thoughtful examination not be able to see the vulgarity of his own prejudices? Baraka's bigotry wasn't just some fluke of ignorance or youth, he made it an unapologetic part of his creative aesthetic (thankfully, not in this work) over decades.

The origin of Africans in America and the music they produced over the last three hundred years was very interesting to read. Mr. Jones provides a chronological and historically based history of the evolution of Black music in America.

He also points out that when black music is accepted by the mainstream it becomes a diluted and pitiful shell of its former greater self. I agree. If anyone notices whenever a beloved artist goes mainstream, generally his or her music is so shallow, you wonder what happened to the real person. I guess it is all about the dollars. They want to get paid. They know that most folks in the mainstream society cannot take or intellectually and spiritually relate to the rawness of our people's music. It is too powerful and personal. The black experience is unique, which affects our worldview and attitudes.

However, the black folk, the masses, always create new music or keep the real music alive. We continuously create, and the mainstream is darn well lucky. If not for black folks, I don't know what in de world they would do with dye selves. Lady this would be such a dull place.

For someone who didn't like the blues this book made me more appreciate the music and eventualy come to like some of it. This book focuses on the development of the blues and starts with the history of African Americans in the US. This is not a typical history book because it intoduced to me some new ideas that most history books would just ignore. it showed how The african american race dealed with racial issues through their music.
Like i said I didn't like any blues until I read this book. I feel this book has caused me to appreciate music much more.

not just about music - jones weaves the detailed and complicated history of african americans throughout this thoughtful, opinionated and very honest book. blues is stripped of over-simplified origins and rooted deeply in the heart of a people and culture with many layers and voices. fascinating and real - a must read.