Will I love Blues People?

This book was actually written before Baraka’s turn to Marxism, but as a social history of African American music, it is more than exemplary of a style of writing that takes the relationship of cultural form to its conditions seriously.

How Baraka moves between the music and the social conditions of Black musicians changed what I thought engaged musical analysis could be.

I have gone back to Blues People for all three of my books. His insight into the blues, jazz, and the relationship of white people and Black music still resonates, and the book is now 60 years old. Things would get much weirder in his life personally and between the races socially in the years after, but this book is no-bullshit truth.