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Blues People (Negro Music in White America) is a seminal study of Afro-American music (and culture generally) by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963.^[1] Baraka dedicates the book to my parents ... the first Negroes I ever met.

Lay-out

The 1999 reprint begins with a reminiscent piece by the author, now 65, titled Blues People: Looking Both Ways, in which he credits poet and English teacher Sterling Brown with having inspired both him and his contemporary A. B. Spellman. Baraka does not here discuss the impact his book has had.

The original text is divided into twelve sections, thus :

the Negro as Non-American

(Some Backgrounds)

the Negro as Property

African Slaves / American Slaves

(Their Music)

Afro-Christian Music & Religion

Slave and Post-Slave

Primitive Blues & Primitive Jazz

Classic Blues

This is the section which one hears read aloud in Jean-Luc Godard's film One Plus One (1968). The reader is a Black Panther. Most of Baraka's first paragraph (beginning What has been called classic blues was the result of more diverse sociological and musical influences ..) is audible even while the camera moves off toward other Panthers, before the ambient noise of activity and other speeches drown it out. In a later section of the same film (titled All about Eve) a scrum of reporters follows a woman representing the spirit of Democracy; one wants to know with whom she was just now on the telephone: Did you call leRoi Jones?

the City

Enter the Middle Class

Swing--from Verb to Noun

the Blues Continuum

the Modern Scene

Notes & References