Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Amiri Baraka

››› Free download audio book. ‹‹‹ Original Title: Blues People ISBN: 068818474X ISBN13: 9780688184742 Autor: Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (original published name) Rating: 3.8 of 5 stars (1946) counts Original Format: Paperback, 256 pages Download Format: PDF, TXT, ePub, iBook. Published: January 20th 1999 / by Harper Perennial / (first published 1968) Language: English Genre(s): Nonfiction- 40 users

Cultural >African American- 14 users Music- 12 users Race- 9 users Music >Jazz- 8 users

Description: "The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

About Author:

Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School. His father, Coyt Leverette Jones, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother, Anna Lois (née Russ), was a social worker. In 1967 he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka. The Universities where he studied were Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard Universities, leaving without a degree, and the New School for Social Research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard University. His major fields of study were philosophy and religion. Baraka also served

three years in the U.S. Air Force as a gunner. Baraka continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet writings, Baraka was put on gardening duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty. The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village working initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time he came into contact with Beat, Black Mountain College and New York School poets. In 1958 he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Baraka visited Cuba in July 1960 with a Fair Play for Cuba Committee delegation and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre. He had begun to be a politically active artist. In 1961 a first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published, followed in 1963 by Blues People: Negro Music in White America—to this day one of the most influential volumes of jazz criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning Free Jazz movement. His acclaimed controversial play Dutchman premiered in 1964 and received an Obie Award the same year. After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Baraka left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His revolutionary and now antisemitic poetry became controversial. In 1966, Baraka married his second wife, Sylvia Robinson, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967 he lectured at San Francisco State University In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the 1967 Newark riots, and was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison; shortly afterward an appeals court reversed the sentence based on his defense by attorney, Raymond A. Brown. That same year his second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, came out, a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly anti-Jewish poems and articles, similar to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam. Around 1974, Baraka distanced himself from Black nationalism and became a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979 he became a lecturer SUNY-Stony Brook's Africana Studies Department. In 1980 he denounced his former anti-semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-zionist. In 1984 Baraka became a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure.In 1989 he won an American Book Award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes Award. In 1990 he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 was a supporting actor in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth. In 1996, Baraka contributed to the AIDS benefit album Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip produced by the Red Hot Organization.In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Amiri Baraka on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Other Editions:

- Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America And The Music That Developed From It (Paperback)

- Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America And The Music That Developed From It (Paperback)

- Il popolo del blues. Sociologia degli afroamericani attraverso il jazz (Paperback)

- Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Hardcover)

- Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Paperback)

Books By Author:

- Dutchman & The Slave

- The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader

- Transbluesency: Selected Poems, 1961-1995

- Black Music

- The Dead Lecturer

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- The Land Where the Blues Began

- Stomping The Blues

- Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

- Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

- Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music & Culture)

- The History Of The Blues: The Roots, The Music, The People

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- Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement

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Rewiews:

Mar 15, 2014 Leslie Reese Rated it: really liked it After learning that Amiri Baraka had passed away (October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014), I wanted to commemorate him by reading some of his work. Blues People was a book he published in 1963 back when he was still LeRoi Jones and African Americans were called Negroes. I didn’t purchase the book until sometime in the 1990s---at least 30 years after its initial publication. The book was

too deep for me and I set it aside for another 20+ years. It’s still pretty deep but I wanted to wrap my mind aroun After learning that Amiri Baraka had passed away (October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014), I wanted to commemorate him by reading some of his work. Blues People was a book he published in 1963 back when he was still LeRoi Jones and African Americans were called Negroes. I didn’t purchase the book until sometime in the 1990s---at least 30 years after its initial publication. The book was too deep for me and I set it aside for another 20+ years. It’s still pretty deep but I wanted to wrap my mind around this dense, yet, succinct text that traces how the blues developed NOT with enslaved Africans but from their enslaved descendants: American born and bred; disenfranchised, not accepted as full citizens with inalienable rights. Their earliest experiences, work songs, field hollers and spirituals incubated and invented the musical genres known as “blues” and “jazz”. When I was younger I remember people saying that black people had a natural talent for music and dancing and being emotionally “soulful” and sexually uninhibited. It was a dismissive shortcut that denied historical layers of injustice experienced by blacks in white america, while diminishing a people’s creative and intellectual power and cultural gifts. LeRoi Jones’ book restores some of the humanity and dignity absent from those old assumptions. While I found this text challenging to read, it was also illuminating, and shrewd; written by someone with a deep love and long memory for music, black people, and other folks. I tried to imagine how fresh and bracing it might have been to read it in 1963. 5 likes