Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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It is an exercise described throughout the book that I might classify in accordance with the title as "negro music navel gazing". 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. Baraka’s Blues People was part of this shift among young, well-educated blacks, part of a growing repudiation of “middle-class” values of patience and decorum. For it would seem that while Negroes have been undergoing a process of “Americanization” from a time preceding the birth of this nation—including the fusing of their blood lines with other non-African strains, there has persisted a stubborn confusion as to their American identity. J/B moves beyond that period, though, touching on the role of the church in freedmen's lives, and, most interestingly, the early split after emancipation between a nascent middle-class black strata and the largely poor majority.

Early works by black authors] primarily focused on the written tradition of African-American music, as part of the Western art music tradition," says University of Pennsylvania professor Guthrie Ramsey, author of Bud Powell: Black Genius, Black History and the Challenge of Bebop. It's a different one from the environment Blues People was written in, but no less exploitative; no less cynical, and it needs a different analysis. 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. Perhaps not the best book for the blues initiate, but probably one of the best you could read on the subject, with a non-obnoxious, somewhat sociological slant on the theme. Slavery was a most vicious system and those who endured and survived it a tough people, but it was not (and this is important for Negroes to remember for their own sense of who and what their grandparents were) a state of absolute repression.He looks at the many African influences of the blues, as well as its opposition to more classical Western (as in Western Civilization) styles of music, and how it has evolved. They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true," Baraka says. Jones makes a distinction between classic and country blues, the one being entertainment and the other folklore.

For their part, contemporary jazz historians have devoted much energy to understanding how jazz musicians tried to succeed both as artists and as workers who needed to make a living through their music—which is to say, as professionals. That’s not just because “Blues People” — which centers the blues as the foundation of American music, and the lives of Black Americans as the foundation of the blues — has been widely influential, shaping public and institutional understanding of the history of the blues, jazz and American culture. Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society (2024 Edition) Get A Job, Get A Car, Get A Bed, Get Drunk! One would get the impression that there was a rigid correlation between color, education, income and the Negro’s preference in music. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro’s experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro’s conscious appearance on the American scene.

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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. From these components enslaved Africans crafted the first spirituals and work songs, which would evolve in time into gospel music and the blues, respectively.

He starts with slavery, when black captives were deprived of their freedom, their religion, and their traditional songs and presented instead with forced labor, Christianity, and the Protestant hymnbook.

These cultural traits became transmuted as the African lost consciousness of his African background, and his music, his religion, his language and his speech gradually became that of the American Negro. Spellman says a 2013 version of Blues People would naturally be different, but the focus on black experiences would remain.