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dkai's review against another edition
4.0
Take it with some grains of salt, and it's a hearty meal.
I came looking for a book to inform me about blues (and to a lesser extent, jazz), and boy, did I get it. Starting from the time of slavery and moving all the way through cool jazz, the author covers everything in great historical detail. There's analysis of individual musicians, styles, cultural movements, historical events, migrations, etc. Baraka weaves everything together quite well, whether it is talking about one musician's direct influence on another, or drawing comparisons to earlier events. If you have never read books on blues, it's hard to beat starting with this one.
It is true that the author colors the book with his opinion. In my opinion, this is necessary. I do not read just to be informed; I want to have my ideas challenged, to argue or agree with the author in my head, and find out what his thoughts are, rather than mere historical facts. I don't think his opinions skew the facts that much, and it is easy to separate the facts from the thoughts. Essentially, in my opinion you can't write a good history on blues without some bias.
I came looking for a book to inform me about blues (and to a lesser extent, jazz), and boy, did I get it. Starting from the time of slavery and moving all the way through cool jazz, the author covers everything in great historical detail. There's analysis of individual musicians, styles, cultural movements, historical events, migrations, etc. Baraka weaves everything together quite well, whether it is talking about one musician's direct influence on another, or drawing comparisons to earlier events. If you have never read books on blues, it's hard to beat starting with this one.
It is true that the author colors the book with his opinion. In my opinion, this is necessary. I do not read just to be informed; I want to have my ideas challenged, to argue or agree with the author in my head, and find out what his thoughts are, rather than mere historical facts. I don't think his opinions skew the facts that much, and it is easy to separate the facts from the thoughts. Essentially, in my opinion you can't write a good history on blues without some bias.
jerihurd's review against another edition
3.0
Not exactly light reading, but I certainly learned a lot. Would probably get a lot more out of it if I knew more music theory.
hikemogan's review against another edition
5.0
I picked up the 1963 first edition of Blues People in a used bookstore. Many of the themes running through Baraka's book still feel relevant in the 21st century as we face down renewed crises of racism and a stifling capitalistic focus in our culture.
Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) traces the musical ancestry of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock music back to the first slave ships to land in North America. In doing so, he also weaves into the narrative an examination of black Americans' history from "day one" as being a history set apart from the cultural, social, and value norms of mainstream American culture. Early in Blues People, Baraka wrote about what distinguished many black slaves in America from their enslaved counterparts throughout history (west Africa, Rome, Greece, Babylon, etc.) was that the black slave in America wasn't even considered human in the ways that whites understood the word. They were thought of as a a piece of property, a sub-species, certainly not "equal" to the white man in any way. As such, they could never blend into society through time and exposure the way Italians or the Irish quickly did. With this mindset, acculturation and assimilation of slaves and ex-slaves into American society was impossible. In turn, that dominant society paradoxically expressed extreme hostility that assimilation did not occur and on the other hand used any manner of coercion to ensure it couldn't happen. Baraka writes: "It is absurd to assume, as has been the tendency, among a great many Western anthropologists and sociologists, that all traces of Africa were erased from the Negro's mind because he learned English." The resulting cultural, social, and value differences, claims Baraka, persist in white and in black communities to this day. Those differences can be seen in the evolution of one of America's greatest artistic contributions to the world: jazz and rock n' roll music.
The notion of being a permanent outsider is a theme that runs from Baraka's discussion of early conceptions of black society in America up until the end of the book where he discusses art, artists, and bohemian lifestyles being in direct opposition to America's pervasive money-minded "economic sensibility." Though he was talking about the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's not hard to superimpose the themes and history examined in this book onto the world today.
Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) traces the musical ancestry of jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock music back to the first slave ships to land in North America. In doing so, he also weaves into the narrative an examination of black Americans' history from "day one" as being a history set apart from the cultural, social, and value norms of mainstream American culture. Early in Blues People, Baraka wrote about what distinguished many black slaves in America from their enslaved counterparts throughout history (west Africa, Rome, Greece, Babylon, etc.) was that the black slave in America wasn't even considered human in the ways that whites understood the word. They were thought of as a a piece of property, a sub-species, certainly not "equal" to the white man in any way. As such, they could never blend into society through time and exposure the way Italians or the Irish quickly did. With this mindset, acculturation and assimilation of slaves and ex-slaves into American society was impossible. In turn, that dominant society paradoxically expressed extreme hostility that assimilation did not occur and on the other hand used any manner of coercion to ensure it couldn't happen. Baraka writes: "It is absurd to assume, as has been the tendency, among a great many Western anthropologists and sociologists, that all traces of Africa were erased from the Negro's mind because he learned English." The resulting cultural, social, and value differences, claims Baraka, persist in white and in black communities to this day. Those differences can be seen in the evolution of one of America's greatest artistic contributions to the world: jazz and rock n' roll music.
The notion of being a permanent outsider is a theme that runs from Baraka's discussion of early conceptions of black society in America up until the end of the book where he discusses art, artists, and bohemian lifestyles being in direct opposition to America's pervasive money-minded "economic sensibility." Though he was talking about the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's not hard to superimpose the themes and history examined in this book onto the world today.
rpc415's review against another edition
5.0
Dude hates on ragtime and hard bop a lil too much, I think
lucasmiller's review against another edition
3.0
Felt much more like an artifact of the early 1960s and the Black Arts Movement than a history of African American Music. That being said, Baraka does make some really insightful and interesting arguments about the meaning and progression of Black music in American History.
The early chapters that cover the development of African American music and culture during slavery and the age of Emancipation feel like Black Power readings of black History, the later chapters that focus on the development of Jazz from the 1920s-1950s really feel like a unique and very personal argument about the way Jazz developed.
I don't know enough about Jazz to follow everything Baraka lays out, but this book really shows how expansive and integral the examination of Black culture is to understanding Black History.
The early chapters that cover the development of African American music and culture during slavery and the age of Emancipation feel like Black Power readings of black History, the later chapters that focus on the development of Jazz from the 1920s-1950s really feel like a unique and very personal argument about the way Jazz developed.
I don't know enough about Jazz to follow everything Baraka lays out, but this book really shows how expansive and integral the examination of Black culture is to understanding Black History.
lyderature's review against another edition
I need more critical nonfiction in my life.
bufally47's review against another edition
2.0
Much more academic than I’m used to for books on music. Also this seemed to be at least as much about jazz as it was about blues, if not more. I understand that they’re intertwined, but I didn’t get a lot of the references to jazz musicians and didn’t expect to encounter so many, considering the subtitle. The insights into the psyche of African Americans from the Reconstruction through the Great Migration were at times sharp and shrewd and new to me. There’s a lot of social history here, which is admittedly crucial in order to recount the history of American blues, but sometimes it veered too far off into textbook-land and the music seemed beside the point. Also, having been written in the early sixties, the book constantly used the term Negro which I found distracting. The most informative bits, for me, concerned the influence of African music on the blues (chorus/verse, AAB structure, etc) which was mostly present in the first half of the book. The second half really dragged for me, although author’s evisceration of ragtime was pretty entertaining.
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