His sacred music became the spirituals, his work songs and dance music became the blues and primitive jazz, and his religion became a form of Afro-American Christianity. J/B moves beyond that period, though, touching on the role of the church in freedmen's lives, and, most interestingly, the early split after emancipation between a nascent middle-class black strata and the largely poor majority. The trumpeter and composer Russell Gunn will premiere “The Blues and Its People,” a suite inspired by Baraka’s influential text, to mark its 60th anniversary. The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane’s music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music,” he wrote.

He has attempted to place the blues within the context of a total culture and to see this native art form through the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and (though he seriously underrates its importance in the creating of a viable theory) history, and he spells out explicitly his assumptions concerning the relation between the blues, the people who created them, and the larger American culture. And it was indeed, out of the tension between desire and ability that the techniques of jazz emerged. I learned more from reading books about the lives of men like Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter and Blind Willie McTell about TRUE Blues history than anything I read in this book.To be honest, the excellence of Blues People's analysis just makes Amiri Baraka seem even more problematic to me. Somehow it was assumed that the Negroes, of all the diverse American peoples, would remain unaffected by the climate, the weather, the political circumstances—from which not even slaves were exempt—the social structures, the national manners, the modes of production and the tides of the market, the national ideals, the conflicts of values, the rising and falling of national morale, or the complex give and take of acculturalization which was undergone by all others who found their existence within the American democracy. For their part, contemporary jazz historians have devoted much energy to understanding how jazz musicians tried to succeed both as artists and as workers who needed to make a living through their music—which is to say, as professionals. 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. But it was his modern stance, propelled by the momentum of the Civil Rights Era, that made his analysis unique.

Jazz and the blues have often given black musicians creative ways of “making it” in the teeth of middle-class presumptions about how that might be done. 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.Blues People, de LeRoi Jones, cuya versión española hoy publicamos, es el primer intento realizado hasta ahora de situar el jazz y los blues en el contexto de la historia social americana.