Description

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.

Publisher Review

A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music -- LANGSTON HUGHES A panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music . . . the first major book of its kind by a black author -- NPR So essential and, for many of today's music fans, so under-examined . . . Precise, probing and academic * * The Current * * Blues People is not only a fresh, incisively instructive reinterpretation of negro music in America, but it is also crucially relevant to negro-white relationships today -- NAT HENTOFF