Blues People: Negro Music in White America by LeRoi Jones, first published in 1963 by William Morrow, was the first book on blues written by an African-American critic. Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, is a poet, author, novelist, playwright, political activist, and pioneer of the Black Arts Movement. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934, Baraka attended Howard University and joined the Air Force before becoming a beat poet on the Greenwich Village scene. In Blues People, Baraka wrote: ‘The path the slave took to ‘citizenship’ is what I want to look at. 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.’ Baraka later related his poetry to blues: ‘I never came into the world thinking that poetry and music were divorced. I always thought that they should be together. Why did I think that? From the blues, that’s where I took my thing from, the blues. I always liked that. Larry Darnell. The old talking blues, I loved that. Lightning Hopkins. Charles Brown. That’s where I was coming from.’ Baraka retired from a teaching position at the State University of New York-Stony Brook in 1999 but continues to write and work for social change. He and his wife, poet Amina Baraka, live in Newark.
