One of Blues People’s most powerful passages, for instance, describes how early New Orleans musicians were riven by the contradictory desire both to connect with the black community and to “make it” in white and Creole society, and then links this inner conflict between “freedman” and “citizen” identities to the music’s synthesis of blues timbre and brass-band orchestration. 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. She gets preachy with Zisman’s bass on the funky “Listen Here/Cold Duck/Compared To What” and goes to the marrow of the blackchurch on a testifying “Amazing Grace. Ingrid Monson's paper points out the author's "tendency toward social determinism [that] is particularly obvious in Baraka's discussion of class — which, to me, is where his argument is most undermined by essentialism. Its introductory mood of scholarly analysis frequently shatters into a dissonance of accusation, and one gets the impression that while Jones wants to perform a crucial task which he feels someone should take on—as indeed someone should—he is frustrated by the restraint demanded of the critical pen and would like to pick up a club.

The blues speak to us simultaneously of the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condition and they express a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have combined these modes. In 1833, two hundred and fourteen years after the first Africans were brought to these shores as slaves, a certain Mrs. That experience exemplifies deeper aspects of the theories that Baraka, who died in 2014, first laid out in “Blues People” and then explored the rest of his life: that the music’s history is an ongoing community narrative of a people and their adaptation to and adoption of American life.He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in 1965 and, along with poet and critic Larry Neal, kick-started the Black Arts movement — a cultural arm of the Black Power movement. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The idea of a white blues singer seems an even more violent contradiction of terms than the idea of a middle-class blues singer.

At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. Theoretical, in that none of the questions it poses can be said to have been answered definitively or for all time, etc.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 of his personal insights.

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. Intro- LeRoi Jones states that: ‘the path the slave took to ‘citizenship’ is what I want to look at. Jones would take his subject seriously—as the best of jazz critics have always done—and he himself should be so taken. 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. With the end of slavery Jones sees the development of jazz and the blues as results of the more varied forms of experience made available to the freed-man.But Blues People certainly was the first one to take a comprehensive look at the music: where it came from, the people who made it and the culture that produced it. The effectiveness of Negro music and dance is first recorded in the journals and letters of travelers but it is important to remember that they saw and understood only that which they were prepared to accept.

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. 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.

This would still have required the disciplines of anthropology and sociology—but as practiced by Constance Rourke, who was well aware of how much of American cultural expression is Negro. He appears to be attracted to the blues for what he believes they tell us of the sociology of Negro American identity and attitude. Simple taste should have led Jones to Stanley Edgar Hyman’s work on the blues instead of to Paul Oliver’s sadly misdirected effort. For this, no literary explanation, no cultural analyses, no political slogans—indeed, not even a high degree of social or political freedom—was required. 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.