At one point he tells us that “the one peculiar reference to the drastic change in the Negro from slavery to ‘citizenship’ is in his music. The blues might be understood both as folklore and as entertainment, depending on the context; commercial and noncommercial types of music are difficult to disentangle, when the same song might be performed on a stage for money or sung to children for love. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Baraka's writing in this text has the flow of a great uncle who finds it particularly irresistible to not dispense forth a stream of history when he has access to even a single listening ear.

The same year, James Baldwin posed his famous question in The Fire Next Time: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? By which I suppose he means that some Negroes remained in the country and sang a crude form of the blues, while others went to the city, became more sophisticated, and paid to hear Ma Rainey, Bessie, or some of the other Smith girls sing them in a night club or theater.For this, no literary explanation, no cultural analyses, no political slogans—indeed, not even a high degree of social or political freedom—was required.

A half-century later, Amiri Baraka's book remains the first of its kind — and among the most important — in African-American studies. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.Baraka's perspective is necessarily insular and dated, he's not interested in ideas of cross cultural assimilation/appropriation or multicultural influences (which to be honest, are concepts that didn't really fully develop in these kinds of analysis until decades after this was written). And if you study, you'll see [the Africanisms] even in the way Americans talk; it's quite unlike English [from Great Britain]. Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. Granted, I come from a knowledge base primarily focused on Brazil, Afro-Brazilian culture, and the African diaspora as And, in 1968, Jones changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, and later dropped Imamu (meaning "spiritual leader") and changed Ameer to Amiri.

Jones sees bop as a conscious gesture of separatism—ignoring the fact that the creators of the style were seeking, whatever their musical intentions—and they were the least political of men—a fresh form of entertainment which would allow them their fair share of the entertainment market, which had been dominated by whites during the swing era. While the “‘enlightened’ concepts of the Renaissance,” he wrote, “created a schism between what was art and what was life,” black music refused to separate art from living ritual. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz. 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. Attempt to discuss jazz as a hermetic expression of Negro sensibility and immediately we must consider what the “mainstream” of American music really is.That work was highlighted in Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties , where author Scott Saul recounts Baraka’s heralding of John Coltrane as “the heaviest spirit,” exemplar of a black aesthetic. But in keeping himself removed from the discussion, being so analytic and professional in the style of the day, he has robbed us "readers of the future" of many of his personal insights. When they were sung professionally in theaters they were entertainment, when danced to in the form of recordings or used as a means of transmitting the traditional verses and their wisdom, they were folklore.