Blues People: Negro Music in White America

Product Information

Vocalist Kim Nalley sings with a vengeance on this collection of songs that touch on many of the various aspects of the blues. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.

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.His sacred music became the spirituals, his work songs and dance music became the blues and primitive jazz, and his religion became a form of Afro-American Christianity. 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). Here he tries to show how African music became transformed into African-AMERICAN music and then American. It was the influence of the late poet Sterling Brown, who taught generations of Howard students — including Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and conservative economist Thomas Sowell — who gave Baraka the impulse to investigate the older folk traditions of African-American music.

That work was highlighted in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties , where author Scott Saul recounts Baraka’s heralding of John Coltrane as “the heaviest spirit,” exemplar of a black aesthetic. 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. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). At other times, it reads as a doctoral thesis with Baraka casting forth a jargon heavy exultation of the changes brought by the geniuses of strings, woodwinds, and keys that gave birth to blues and jazz movements in ragtime, dixieland, brass, swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, avant garde and other musical forms of that ilk. Very good with toning at the spine ends and sunning to the endpapers in good or better moderately rubbing dust wrapper with dampstain on the inside of the spine and significant edgewear including chips, tears and creases.And that was the real intent of that title: I wanted to focus on them — us — the creators of the blues, which is still, I think, the predominate music under all American music. It is an exercise described throughout the book that I might classify in accordance with the title as "negro music navel gazing". Popularized ragtime, which flooded the country with songsheets in the first decades of [the 20th] century, was a dilution of the Negro style. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.