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120 pages

English

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In this essential and impassioned text, LeRoi Jones traces the intertwined development of blues and jazz music with the history of its creators in 'White America'. As important and relevant as at its first publication in 1963, it shows how music and its people are inseparable - expressing and reflecting the other, surviving and adapting through oppression.

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Blues

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	03 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781838858155
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0440€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

LeRoi Jones , later known as Amiri Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, essays, fiction and criticism. Known for his involvement in the Beat movement and the Black Arts movement, his writing forms some of the defining texts for African-American culture. He served as Poet Laureate for New Jersey and was awarded numerous awards including a PEN award and the Langston Hughes Award. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Also by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Poetry
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
The Dead Lecturer: Poems
Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961–1967
It’s Nation Time
New Music, New Poetry
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
Wise, Why’s Y’s
Funk Lore: New Poems
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
The Book of Monk
Drama
Dutchman
The Slave
The Baptism
The Toilet
A Black Mass
Home on the Range Police
Four Black Revolutionary Plays Slave Ship
The Motion of History and Other Plays
The Sidney Poet Heroical Song
Most Dangerous Man in America
(W. E. B. Du Bois)
Fiction
The System of Dante’s Hell Tales
Un Poco Low Coup
Tales of the Out & the Gone
Non-fiction
Home: Social Essays
The Revolutionary Theatre
Black Music
Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965
Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism
Poetry for the Advanced
reggae or not!
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974–1979
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues
The Essence of Reparations
Edited works
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
Four Black Revolutionary Plays
Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women
The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2

The Canons edition first published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the USA in 1963 by William Morrow & Company, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © LeRoi Jones, 1963 Introduction copyright © Amiri Baraka, 1999
The right of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to: Melrose Music Corp., the copyright owner, for permission to quote from ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’, by Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith.
Progressive Music Publishing Co., Inc., for permission to quote from ‘Married Woman Blues’, words and music by Joe Turner and White Keys Jackson, copyright © 1948 by St. Louis Music Corporation; and for permission to quote from ‘Yakety Yak’, words and music by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, copyright © 1958 by Tiger Music, Inc.
Leeds Music Corporation, New York, N.Y., for permission to quote from ‘How Long, How Long Blues’, by LeRoy Carr, copyright MCMXXIX by Leeds Music Corporation, copyright renewed MCMLVI. All rights reserved. For permission to quote from ‘I’m Sober Now’, by Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith, copyright MCMXLI by Leeds Music Corporation. All rights reserved. For permission to quote from ‘Crazy Blues’, by Perry Bradford, copyright MCMXX by Pickwick Music Corporation, copyright renewed MCMXLVII and assigned to Pickwick Music Corporation. All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 814 8 eISBN 978 1 83885 815 5
Contents
Introduction
1 / The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds
2 / The Negro as Property
3 / African Slaves / American Slaves: Their Music
4 / Afro-Christian Music and Religion
5 / Slave and Post-Slave
6 / Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz
7 / Classic Blues
8 / The City
9 / Enter the Middle Class
10 / Swing-From Verb to Noun
11 / The Blues Continuum
12 / The Modern Scene
Index
To My Parents . . . the first Negroes I ever met
Introduction
Blues People: Looking Both Ways
Blues People has always meant a great deal to me. It was a dramatic self-confirmation, as a personal intellectual and artistic “presence,” but also as the expression of a set of ideas and measures that I have carried with me for many years. Most, even until today.
First, the book had a presence, even in my own head, of weightiness, that is, it rapidly acquired a gravity as it emerged and certainly when completed, in the sense that even though I was admittedly and very openly shooting from the hip (as noted in the Introduction to the first edition, “none of [these] questions . . . have been answered definitively or for all time”) but like Billy the Kid, when he hit the target without aiming, I had been aiming for a long time before I reached for the machine. And there was a thrill to see my own ideas roll out, not always as “precisely stated” as would be the case later; still, they were forceful enough to convince me that I did know something about this music I have loved all my life.
Writing the book confirmed ideas that had been rolling around in my head for years and that now, given the opportunity, flashed out upon the page with a stunning self-exhilaration and certainty. The book, from its opening words, got me high. It made me reach for more and more and more of what I had carried for years, for more of what I had to say, for more of myself.
That is, how to measure this world in which we find ourselves, where we are not at all happy, but clearly able to understand and hopefully, one day, to transform. How to measure my own learning and experience and to set out a system of evaluation, weights, and meaning.
It was Sterling Brown, the great Afro-American poet and my English teacher at Howard University, who first hipped A. B. Spellman and me to the fact that the music was our history, in our English 212 class, where we were lolling around like the classic submature campus hipsters we most emphatically were, “Those Who Would Be Down.” Amidst Sterling’s heavy lectures on Shakespeare (still incredible in their spotlight on the fact that Willie S. was the antifeudal revolutionary, in whose work all the problems of capitalism were first exposed to the quick . . . George Thompson’s ideas in Marxism and Poetry are similar . . . e.g., dig the evil Richard the Third, or Macbeth the Nut, or Othello on racism, Caesar on Democracy, Hamlet on the Liberal, the Merchant on Anti-Semitism, the Shrew on Women’s Oppression, etc., the various monstrous kings and rulers of that dying feudal age.
Sterling “signified” to A. B. & me one day that we wasn’t quite as hip as we thunk, even as self-proclaimed young Boppers, probably quite nasty in our altogether ignorant pseudo-wisdomic stancing. Oh, yeh, we was hip to Bird and Diz and Monk, you dig. Albeit, in a Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz period right then. Thanks to Miles’s “Birth of the Cool,” which we swore was the big number.
I imagine this must have incited Sterling to grasp us lovingly and metaphorically by the scruffs of our conceits and invite us to his crib! And man, there in a center room was a wall, which wrapped completely around our unknowing, of all the music from the spasm bands and arwhoolies and hollers, through Bessie and Jelly Roll and Louis and Duke, you know? And we watched ourselves from that vantage point of the albums staring haughtily at us, with that “tcch tcch” sound such revelations are often armed with.
The albums, Folkways and Commodores, Bluebirds and even a Gennett or three, stared at us with our own lives spelled out in formal expression. “This is the history. This is your history, my history, the history of the Negro people.” That was the phrase that lifted me, lifted us both, I’d say, since A. B.’s Three Lives in the Be Bop Business was another formidable thrust from that encounter.
Later, Sterling began to give a few informal talks on our history as Black Music, in the lounge of the old, then new, Cook Hall and we sat, very literally, at his feet, taking those priceless teachings in. The Music, The Music, this is our history.
But that sat, of course, for years. I had certainly heard it, very deeply, and it dug a hole in my static absolutes, but then it had dropped down inside to foam and bubble and give off ideational vapors that blinked endless analogies and revelations into my perceptions and rationales, throughout the years.
So even as I began Blues People , that idea, now a fundamental philosophical feature of my seeing and understanding, was not at the tip of my focus. What was, was included in the second published essay on the music, in Metronome , “Jazz & The White Critic” (originally, “Black Music, White Critics”). The tentative first title I gave the book was Blues , Black & White America . It was the contrasting aspect of the theme that first superficially captured me: That there was a body of music that came to exist from a people who were brought to this side as slaves and that throughout that music’s development, it had had to survive, expand, reorganize, continue, and express itself, as the fragile property of a powerless and oppressed People.
How did it do this? What was so powerful and desperate in this music that guaranteed its continued existence? Even beyond its creators’ existence? This is what pushed me. But as I began to get into the history of the music, I found that this was impossible without, at the same time, getting deeper into the history of the people. That it was