A review by alexbond3
Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Amiri Baraka, LeRoi Jones

4.0

Amiri Baraka was a 29-year-old hepcat Beat poet when he wrote this in 1963, and his ambition is to trace the history of African Americans and their culture, from slavery to the 1960s, through their music, primarily blues and jazz. His writing is highly academic in tone, and he seems deadly serious about all this. There’s a lot going on in the book and it’s pretty dense, but it’s hard to fault his conviction (often angry and defiant but usually convincing) or style (über-cool but engaged). It takes guts to declare a whole school of jazz (swing) to be inauthentic and lacking in cultural value precisely because it came about when white people discovered an amazing music African Americans were playing, took it, and made it mainstream (thereby debasing it). Then again, you’d likely be hard pressed to find a jazz historian that thinks Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing”, was any more important than many of his black peers. Baraka might seem a bit angry here... but he’s right! It’s when he writes glowingly about Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, bebop, and more that the book really soars.