Blues People: Negro Music in White America

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With the end of slavery Jones sees the development of jazz and the blues as results of the more varied forms of experience made available to the freed-man. Early works by black authors] primarily focused on the written tradition of African-American music, as part of the Western art music tradition," says University of Pennsylvania professor Guthrie Ramsey, author of Bud Powell: Black Genius, Black History and the Challenge of Bebop. When conditions have changed, when the black middle class has entered mainstream America, and the urban underclass is wrapped up in hip-hop, gangsta rap culture, which is relentlessly commercialized by the powerful media, talking about the blues may seem a matter for historians or ethnomusicologists.

It tells us much of the thinking of her opposition, and it reminds us that as late as the 1890s, a time when Negro composers, singers, dancers and comedians dominated the American musical stage, popular Negro songs (including James Weldon Johnson’s “Under the Bamboo Tree,” now immortalized by T. Amiri Baraka situates the blues in the dialectic between white systems of oppression and Black response and resistance. For this, no literary explanation, no cultural analyses, no political slogans—indeed, not even a high degree of social or political freedom—was required. traces not only he development of the Negro music which affected white America, but also the Negro values which affected white America.

The work of Burton Peretti and Scott DeVeaux, for instance, has suggested how jazz artists from the Chicago school of the 1920s and 1930s through New York’s bebop musicians used their identity as professionals to navigate the middle class, flout the canons of white America, and establish more stable economic foundations for their livelihood all at the same time.

A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music.In his 1964 book of essays Shadow and Act, novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that "[t]he tremendous burden of sociology, which Jones would place upon this body of music, is enough to give even the blues the blues.