Article Response: Blues People by LeRoi Jones - Essay Example

Jones suggests that this particularly divisive time created animus within the African-American population, propagated by the notion that much of what was "Negro" was by definition inferior to White culture. In this crucible of division the musical form that would come to be known as the Blues would be born and judged by various groups. This paper will summarize and comment on Barakas aka Jones's reflections on this period of musical and cultural history. In a culture that regards a particular population as thoroughly inferior, the slave mentality bends under this oppressive distinction and begins to loathe itself.

The music born out of that period reveals the changing economic and political conditions that self-emancipation brings, and how that shifting ground translates musically. Initially, the African chants and hollers that occupied slave music were counter-posed with Anglo-Saxon Protestant hymnals that at times were lifted directly from the hymn books themselves. The freedom to Africanize words and the learning of American English resulted in some interesting phraseology to develop in the chants and lyrics that would eventually become the blues.

Furthermore, the difficulties in finding rhymes because of the apparent restriction that an inchoate though developing mastery of English entailed resulted in the repetitive structure that would come to typify the blues form. The need to be able to produce music that was understandable to the American population at large was a manifestation of the recently emancipated slave populations that realized that this musical form could extend across the country rather than just across the plantation fields.

Yet, the Blues maintained its intensely personal form, a form that it would never lose, as the desire to escape the mainstream White American prejudice would continue to psychologically alienate blues musicians. Jones contends that this alienation is not as destructive an element, as some would contend but in fact, contributed to the overall power and beauty of the music. This line of reasoning often contradicts commonly held perceptions of the slave and Jim Crow era as a wholly bad, wholly destructive period for African-Americans.

While it is clear that untold atrocities were committed on a more than daily basis towards that part of society; Jones wishes to argue that there were some constructive elements that uniquely contributed to African-American identity. To reject that out-of-hand is to reject part of that identity while recognizing the potentially politically shaky ground that admitting such an era had positive elements sounds like someone saying, "Slavery was not all bad." Though I do not think this is what Jones has in mind, it is a careful argument he crafts to explicate this fine line.

Finally, the arrival of blues music as a genre of entertainment, further added elements to the genre that was not straightforward. Initially, the black minstrel shows became self-caricaturing exaggerations of themselves, as a sort of ironic twist that evidently poked fun at their white audience as much as it seemed to poke fun at the oppressed minority. This entertainment aspect did change the musical form, offering more melodic and pleasantly sounding compilations that still did not shy away from the harsh realities of black life during the early part of the 20th century.

Moreover, while still generally outside the mainstream, this aspect of entertainment did slowly cause the music to head towards the mainstream as evidenced by the growing popularity of Bessie Smith. While Smith and other musicians like her were still classified as Negro musicians and not American musicians, the music did become closer to mainstream American thought than it had ever been before.