Blues People

In Blues People Negro Music in White America Amiri Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music. It is considered a classic work on jazz and blues music in American culture, and it documents the effects jazz and blues had on America on an economic, musical, and social level. Baraka contends that although slavery destroyed many formal artistic traditions, African American music represents certain African survivals. Most important, African American music represents an African approach to culture. 

 “As I began to get in to the history of the music, I found that it was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people. That it was    the history of the Afro-American people as text, as tale, as story, as exposition, narrative…that music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection of Afro-American life, our words, the libretto, to those actual, lived lives. That the music was an orchestrated, vocalized, hummed, chanted, blown, beaten, scatted, corollary confirmation of the history… That music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people!”

This quote shows the significance of African/Black music in the history, the culture, the lives of the people.

Christianity was the biggest religion for African Americans during the early nineteenth century. It gave them a sense of freedom, and music placed a big role for them. The blues originated during slavery, it was significant to the conditions in which African/Black people had lived and the efforts to survive address and improve those conditions. In the first half of the past century, jazz was the dominant musical form. Music was a tool for Black people to transmit messages for expressing some of their pain, consciousness, spirituality and the conditions of injustice in which people were living and the desire for those conditions to change. 

I am not a big fan of jazz musis or of the blues, but I found Baraka's article on black music in America to be very interesting because I got to learn how the legacy of slavery affected the evolution of the music. For anyone who is a fan of the genre I think the article was of great use.