About this deal
The music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection, of Afro-American life. When he first read Amiri Baraka’s epochal study “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” originally published in 1963, Russell Gunn felt that he already understood, on some level, the book’s urgent themes. Seminal work from playwright, poet, critic and activist LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, in which the author traces the influence of jazz and blues 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. His attitude as “musician” would lead him to seek to possess the music expressed through the technique, but until he could do so he would hum, whistle, sing, or play the tunes to the best of his ability on any available instrument. How could someone capable of such a brilliant, thoughtful examination not be able to see the vulgarity of his own prejudices?
His sacred music became the spirituals, his work songs and dance music became the blues and primitive jazz, and his religion became a form of Afro-American Christianity. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. 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.Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. Jones/Baraka digs deep into the American psyche for this, approaching slavery and its aftermath as the seed bed from which a rich African-American tradition arose. He is depicted in profile, from the shoulders up, facing the right edge of the book and he is singing. 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.
Baraka — as LeRoi Jones — came from a middle-class upbringing, including university studies at Rutgers, Columbia and Howard Universities. Jones focuses most of his attention, in later chapters, on the birth of jazz, and how it (as well as country, folk, rock and roll) owe their creation to the blues.
S., leading to an ongoing (and often fraught) cycle of musical appropriation and reinvention; and 3) that black music differs most crucially from its white reproductions (and ultimately transcends them) because at its best it possesses an inborn "blues" impulse which can only ever be imitated by white performers, never fully embodied.