Blues People
Negro Music in White America

gone where the Southern cross the yella dog 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'......more

"In my time of dying/don't want nobody to mourn. All I want for you to do is take my body home." .Starting with slave hymns, work camp songs, gospel, and jazz the blues IS the sound of America; its greatest contribution to world culture. Amiri Baraka situates the blues in the dialectic between white......more

Leroi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka) wrote his book "Blues People: Negro Music in White America" in 1963, and it is still one of the definitive texts about the blues. Jones approaches this musical genre from a sociological, historical, and political standpoint, starting with the early slave trade in Am......more

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 an......more

"This book should be taken as a strictly theoretical endeavor. Theoretical, in that none of the questions it poses can be said to have been answered definitively or for all time, etc. In fact, the book proposes more questions than it will answer." ~ Amiri Baraka from the Introduction to "Blues Peopl......more