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] In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the level of assimilation of black Americans into American society can be traced through the evolution of African-American music. Baraka dedicates the book to my parents ... the first Negroes I ever met.
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 :
In the opening section Baraka argues that Africans struggled in America largely because Western culture was so alien to them. He describes various fundamental differentiations, starting with the language gap between Africans and Americans that influenced the first generation of slaves. This argument is supplemented by historic references to ancient slave societies like Rome where the slaves spoke their masters' language, allowing for human communication rather than complete dehumanization. Baraka proceeds to a more philosophical difference, the humanism of western society following the Renaissance in contrast to African spirituality. He argues that the centrality of the human experience in America would have been too difficult for African-Americans to comprehend immediately, creating another barrier.
This section focuses on the unique position of Afro-Americans. First, it is shown that Afro-Americans are fundamentally different from other immigrant groups that eventually attained equal status in America because Africans were the only immigrants brought here unwillingly. Then, the book considers the African diaspora as a whole, showing that Africans in America have the lowest retention of their cultural background of any localized group of Africans. The book argues that this is caused by the unusually high amount of contact between masters and slaves in America.
(Their Music)
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?