Baraka — Blues People

Author: Amiri Baraka (published as LeRoi Jones)
Title: Blues People: Negro Music in White America
Year: 1963
Type: Book (William Morrow)

Blues People: Negro Music in White America is a book by the poet Amiri Baraka, published by William Morrow in 1963 under his earlier name, LeRoi Jones. It traces the path from slavery to citizenship through the music most closely associated with Black Americans, from the music of slavery and the church through the blues and the city to swing and what its last chapter calls the modern scene, and it argues that the blues could exist only once African captives had become American captives. It treats the approach of the music to the white mainstream as a cost: in its account swing became a style that white bands sold, rock & roll was a commercialization of rhythm and blues, and the Black middle class pursued assimilation. NPR’s fiftieth-anniversary retrospective called it the first major book of its kind by a Black author, it has never gone out of print, and the historian Guthrie Ramsey named Sterling Stuckey, Samuel Floyd, Ingrid Monson and Scott DeVeaux among the scholars it influenced. Ralph Ellison, reviewing it in 1964, objected that it places too much sociology on the music, and Monson, who teaches the book, identified a social determinism in its treatment of class as its weakness.

Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, was a poet in his twenties, born in Newark and living on the Lower East Side of New York, when William Morrow published the book in 1963.¹ He stated its subject as the path the slave took to citizenship, traced through the music most closely associated with Black Americans: the blues and, as a later and parallel development, jazz.² He called the book a “theoretical endeavor” that raises more questions than it answers.¹ NPR’s retrospective describes it as inspired by the late poet Sterling Brown.¹ Baraka writes that “Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”³ The twelve chapters run from “The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds” through the music of slavery, Afro-Christian music, “Slave and Post-Slave,” the early and classic blues, “The City,” “Enter the Middle Class” and swing to “The Modern Scene.”⁴

The later chapters count the cost of the music’s approach to the American mainstream. In the chapter “Swing—From Verb to Noun,” swing changes from something the music does to a style that white bands sold, and Baraka sets Louis Armstrong, whose playing he places within the traditions of Afro-American music, beside Bix Beiderbecke, whose playing he calls white jazz.⁵ The chapter includes the sentence “Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it!”⁵ Baraka describes rock & roll as “usually a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues,” which, because its materials were foreign to middle-class culture, had not become as emotionally empty as commercial swing.⁶ Ingrid Monson summarized the book’s view of the Black middle class as a class dedicated to assimilation.⁷

NPR’s retrospective called Blues People the first major book of its kind by a Black author and reported that Black and white critics received it well; Langston Hughes called it “a must” for anyone who wanted to understand America’s most popular music.¹ Ralph Ellison’s review in The New York Review of Books, published on February 6, 1964, and collected the same year in Shadow and Act, objected that “the tremendous burden of sociology” Baraka placed on the music was “enough to give even the blues the blues.”⁸ Ellison wrote that the blues speak of the tragic and the comic sides of human life at once, and that Bessie Smith was, inside her own community, “a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group.”⁸ Baraka answered in 2013 that Ellison held a romantic conception of the blues and would not accept a sociological analysis of it.¹

The book has never gone out of print, and Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies describes it as a precursor to cultural studies and critical race theory.⁹ The Blues Foundation inducted it into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2005.¹⁰ The historian Guthrie Ramsey named Sterling Stuckey, Samuel Floyd, Ingrid Monson and Scott DeVeaux among the scholars it influenced.¹ Monson, a professor of African American music at Harvard, wrote in 2004 that she assigns parts of the book in almost every course she teaches and called it “brilliant and path-breaking” for the scope of its interpretation, though not all of its facts are correct. She located its weakness in a social determinism that treats middle-class status as the mark of inauthenticity.⁷

Key contributions

• The music of Black Americans read as a record of their passage from slavery to citizenship, form by form, from the music of slavery to the jazz of the modern scene.
• The assimilation argument: each approach of the music to the white mainstream, through middle-class aspiration and white commerce, diluted it.
• The distinction between swing as a practice of the music and swing as a style sold by white bands.

See also

• The Birth of Bebop — Scott DeVeaux’s 1997 history of bebop’s origins in the jazz business
• The History of Jazz — Ted Gioia’s 1997 survey of jazz
• Blues — the genre
• Jazz — the genre