Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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And this black middle class, in turn, tried always to dictate that self, or this image of a whiter Negro, to the poorer, blacker Negroes. 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. To be honest, the excellence of Blues People's analysis just makes Amiri Baraka seem even more problematic to me.

Whether this makes them “middle class” in Jones’s eyes I can’t say, but his assertions—which are fine as personal statement—are not in keeping with the facts; his theory flounders before that complex of human motives which makes human history, and which is so characteristic of the American Negro. 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.Baraka wrote that Blues People was a "theoretical endeavor" that "proposes more questions than it will answer" about how descendants of enslaved Africans created a new American musical genre and turned "Negroes" into "African Americans" in the process. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. This is what we did naturally, before we knew anything about New York, or people getting signed for their rapping. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. Jones attempts to impose an ideology upon this cultural complexity and this might be useful if he knew enough of the related subjects to make it interesting.

Sterling] Brown said if you study the actual music and the lyrics, they're talking about their lives. Professor Brown] knew the music very well — particularly the great heroic bands like [Duke] Ellington, [Don] Redman, [Jimmie] Lunceford and [Count] Basie, and so forth," Spellman says. A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music.S., leading to an ongoing (and often fraught) cycle of musical appropriation and reinvention; and 3) that black music differs most crucially from its white reproductions (and ultimately transcends them) because at its best it possesses an inborn "blues" impulse which can only ever be imitated by white performers, never fully embodied. When you are finished, you won't be an expert on the subject of blues or jazz music, but he does manage to fill you deeply with a sense of ownership and responsibility for holding and transmitting the history.

The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues. She teams with Hall and a wildly free and passionate “Summertime” and then goes to the TV theme from The Jefferson’s for a swaying gospel read of “Movin’ On Up. 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. Perhaps this explains why Jones, who is also a poet and editor of a poetry magazine, gives little attention to the blues as lyric, as a form of poetry. 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.My main criticism, apart from the fact that history dictates that we must be left over 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.