Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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Baraka wrote of Coltrane that he “showed us how to murder the popular song,” an act Baraka rendered emblematic: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it.

The book was originally titled Blues: Black and White," says Baraka, now 78, by phone from Newark, while he was working on his son Ras Baraka's mayoral campaign. The team of Tammy Hall/p-org, Greg Skaff/g, Michael Zisman/b, Kent Bryson/dr and Bryan Dyer/voc is mixed and matched on songs that are going to rattle your previous reference points of songs you’re familiar with.My only real complaint with the book is that it focuses more on jazz than the blues, and it only gives a very brief and fleeting description of the many schools of blues: Mississippi Delta, Chicago, country. Franklin Frazier, whose Black Bourgeoisie was a well-known indictment of the black middle class as a self-hating group, a wedge between the black working class and the much larger dominant culture. Thus, while he might stand in awe before the superior technical ability of a white musician, and while he was forced to recognize a superior social status, he would never feel awed before the music which the technique of the white musician made available. Sterling] Brown said if you study the actual music and the lyrics, they're talking about their lives.

Spellman says a 2013 version of Blues People would naturally be different, but the focus on black experiences would remain. I'm not sure, but I think Jones followed up this book with a sequel, which would also be worth reading. Attempt to discuss jazz as a hermetic expression of Negro sensibility and immediately we must consider what the “mainstream” of American music really is. 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 materials of blues were not available to the white American, even though some strange circumstance might prompt him to look for them.He cited the assassination of Malcolm X two years later as the catalyst for his radicalization, but ideologies don't develop overnight and it's not hard to find hints of the later Baraka's thought in this socio-cultural history of black music in America. While doing so, Baraka also provides a deepened understanding of American history, economics, and culture.

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.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. So it took me a decade to find that those records told a story: Every voice, every title is telling you the story of Afro-American history. We’ve fled the past and trained ourselves to suppress, if not forget, troublesome details of the national memory, and a great part of our optimism, like our progress, has been bought at the cost of ignoring the processes through which we’ve arrived at any given moment in our national existence. It also stops at around the time that blues music was taking off into some very interesting and different directions, especially in regards to the late-60s with Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, etc. The following is an excerpt from the book's introduction: "As I began to get into the history of the music, I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people.