The Gospel According to LeRoi Jones: Gospel Music as Passing Reference in Blues People

Introduction

Blues People is young LeRoi Jones’ vigorous quest to explain, explore, and celebrate the Spirit that animates Black Life and permeates authentic Black Music. In this seminal comprehensive exploration, he deftly discusses Africanisms, survivals, retentions—what I also refer to throughout this essay as African spiritual/musical memory, or tradition—as the origin of the field hollers, shouts, and call and response embedded in the work songs of enslaved Africans. Then, entwined with Africanized rhythms and delivery of European hymns, Jones explains that this memory became the primary referent in the creation of Spirituals of the early Afro-Christian religion as well as “church marches, ring and shuffle shouts, ‘sankeys’ camp or meeting songs, and hymns or ‘ballits’” of the Afro-Christian masses.¹ He then plunges to the heart of his deeply insightful, multi-level discussion of the Blues and Jazz as the secular offspring of this religious music heritage within the context of African Americans’ experiences in this country.

In Blues People, Jones masterfully lays out the sweeping saga of the birth and evolution of Black Music as a mirror of African American history, the enduring impact of African sensibilities, and the influence of the sacred Spirituals on “secular” Blues and Jazz. Yet, by the end of the book, it is clear there is a glaring omission: he stops short of continuing the arc of Black Music by describing the emergence and impact of Gospel songs, another form of Black sacred music issued from the primordial African spiritual/musical memory.

Born most immediately of Blues and Jazz, Gospel Music blossomed during the Great Depression, and by the 1950s and 1960s, African American Jazz musicians were using its power to revitalize their music. In leaving the story of Gospel Music untold, Jones also did not continue the complex, cyclical story of Black Music by talking about ‘secular’ R&B as the progeny of sacred Gospel Music.

Why this omission in Blues People, especially given Jones’ painstaking efforts to trace the connections, continuities, and the disruptions that characterized the evolution of Black Music through the mid-twentieth century? After all, the story of Gospel Music embodies a narrative that gives further credence to the author’s assertion that authentic Black Music springs from the Black masses and is descended from the African spiritual/musical tradition at the core of the songs of southern, rural Black folk. Moreover, the story of Gospel Music as an outcast, shunned in its early years by the formal Church of the Black Middle Class, jibes with Jones’ assertion that authentic Black Music is vilified by that class because it runs counter to the assimilationist bent of that stratum.

So, the reprise: Why is a discussion of Gospel Music omitted from Blues People? And did a wiser Amiri Baraka ever turn his attention to this genre and incorporate discussion of it into the fabric of later explorations into Black Music? That is what I explore in this essay. For clarity’s sake, I must note here that throughout, when speaking of him as the author of Blues People and other writings up to 1968, I identify the author as LeRoi Jones. In reference to his work published thereafter, he is identified as Amiri Baraka.

I
The Spirit will not descend without song
Background and Context

Blues People was penned in the adolescence of the career of LeRoi Jones—before he became Imamu Amear Baraka, and then later, Amiri Baraka.² Although tempered or elaborated upon in nuanced ways over time, it was in this book of his youth that he articulated foundational ideas and insights to connect Black Music to African American history and the African spiritual/musical tradition conceiving a Black Aesthetic that would inform his creative and non-fiction writings over the next half-century.

In Blues People, Jones is an iconoclast, smashing long-held, wrongheaded, and racist myths about the existence and value of Black Culture while excavating and interpreting myriad authentic African cultural artifacts in existence over millennia that have shaped the African American Experience. In doing so, his insights informed the work of many of his contemporaries and future intellectuals—Black and white. Theologian James H. Cone, for example, used Blues People as a frequent referent in his 1972 book The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. Just as important, Jones fomented healthy debate among historians, musicologists, theorists, critics, and musicians that continues today.³

Written at the cusp of his movement from Beat poet to Black Cultural Nationalist (with hints of the Third World Marxist still to come), Blues People reflects the beginnings of Jones’ personal break with the primarily white American literary sub-culture of the Beat Generation to define himself as a Black Man/writer/artist creating authentic expressions within the context of the lived experiences of the Black masses.

By extension, the book reflects the author’s mental, emotional, and spiritual break from the intra-racial social constructs he perceived as contributing to the repression of Black people and the stifling of Black Music. Ironically, he identifies as the earliest of such constructs Afro-Christian religion, which he says has stratified Black congregants, divorced them from their African spiritual/musical memory, and pushed them to embrace the ways of white religious institutions. During enslavement, Jones points out, the Black Church dictated social stations—from fieldhand to house slave. After enslavement, Black religious institutions of established Christian denominations continued to imitate the structures and worship styles of white churches and dictate social stratification within the Black Community more broadly, giving rise to another social construct, the Black Middle Class, which intensified efforts to eliminate Africanisms in worship, music, and day-to-day life.⁴

Jones’ position on the existence of Africanisms in Black Culture was in stark contrast to the argument of such sociologists as E. Franklin Frazier that all connection to the Motherland was lost by African Americans during enslavement. Still, in the Blues People chapters “Afro-Christian Religion and Music,” “Slave and Post-Slave,” and “Enter the Middle Class,” there are similarities to Frazier’s scathing 1957 description of the Black Middle Class as obsessed with assimilation and devoid of pride in their race and culture.⁵

Jones is relentless in his attempt to disassociate authentic Black Music from what he considers the repressive spirit-killing context of the religious institutions of this segment of Black America.

He writes:

The developing middle class and the mainstream of black society found themselves headed two different ways. This disparity within the black community is of such importance that it cannot be overemphasized, and it became more and more pronounced as the Negro achieved more latitude and status in America. At its ugliest, this attitude was symbolized by the abandonment by a great many Negroes of the mores or customs they considered slave customs, or “too Negroid.” Some black churches began to use as much of the white church music as they could.⁶

He adroitly makes the case that the Afro-Christian Church of the masses retained aspects of African spiritual and communal practices and traditions through and after enslavement. Thus, he pre-dates and even anticipates definitional studies of African retentions and community formation by Africana studies scholars such as Joseph Holloway and historians John Blasingame, Eugene Genovese, and Sterling Stuckey.⁷

The author provides a thoughtful examination of the retention of Africanisms in the Church of the masses and the development of Spirituals in the chapter “Afro-Christian Music and Religion.” At the heart of Jones’ study is the African proverb “The spirit will not descend without song.” He posits that music has always played a central part in every aspect of services in the authentic Black Church.⁸ He provides details about the specific elements of African music:

Rhythmic syncopation, polyphony, and shifted accents, as well as the altered timbral qualities and diverse vibrato effects of African music were all used by the Negro to transform most of the “white hymns” into Negro spirituals. The pentatonic scale of the white hymn underwent the same “aberrations” by which the earliest musicologists characterized African music. The same chords and the notes in the scale would be flattened or diminished. And the meeting of the two different musics, the white Christian hymn and the Negro spiritual using that hymn as its point of departure, also produced certain elements that were later used in completely secular music.⁹

Jones goes on to say that the very first “instrumental voicings of New Orleans jazz seem to have come from the arrangement of the singing voices in the early Negro churches as well as the models for the ‘riffs’ and ‘breaks’ of later jazz music.” He adds that the “‘rags,’ ‘blue notes,’ and ‘stop times’” in the music of these early churches of the Black masses “were utilized to an even greater extent later in the development of Jazz.”¹⁰

The author stops short of talking about the next stage in the evolution of Black sacred music—the emergence of Gospel music. He simply ends the chapter with the pronouncement:  “With the legal end of slavery, there was now proposed for the Negro a much fuller life outside the church. There came to be more and more backsliders and more and more of the devil music was heard.”¹¹

II
Do not pass me by
Gospel Music as Passing Reference

In Blues People, there are four passing references to Gospel Music. None is a definition of the genre or provides details of its elements. The first mention is in the chapter “Slave and Post-Slave.” Here the author parenthetically recounts his personal experience of being raised in a middle-class Black Church:

(My own church in Newark, New Jersey, a Baptist church, has almost no resemblance to the older, more traditional Negro Christian churches. The music, for instance, is usually limited to the less emotional white church music, and the choir usually sings Bach or Handel during Christmas and Easter. In response to some of its older “country” members, the church, which is headed by a minister who is the most respected Negro in Newark, has to import gospel groups [emphasis mine], or singers having a more traditional “Negro church” sound.)¹²

Jones does not refer to Gospel Music again until the end of the last chapter of Blues People, “The Modern Scene.” This second mention is in a quote from a 1959 article by Jazz critic Martin Williams that Jones inserts in the chapter. He uses Williams’ words as a part of his analysis of hard bop, introduced in the mid-1950s as the “counterreaction” to the cooptation of the “cool” Jazz of Black musicians like Miles Davis and John Lewis by white musicians like Chet Baker and Dave Brubeck. The use of the rhythms and tones of Gospel was an attempt by these Black musicians to reclaim their music by returning to their roots. Jones quotes Williams’ essay “The Funky Hard Bop Regression:”

It was Horace Silver as musical director of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers who first announced it, of course, and obviously, he and the rest had turned to church and gospel music [emphasis mine] and the blues as sources of renewed inspiration. If these men were reluctant to listen to King Oliver and Bessie Smith, they heard Ray Charles and Mahalia Jackson with a kind of reverence.¹³

Jones’ third mention of Gospel Music is an admonition of what he calls “quasi-gospel” in hard bop:

The hard boppers sought to revitalize jazz, but they did not go far enough. Somehow, they lost sight of the important ideas to be learned from bebop and substituted largeness of timbre and quasi-gospel influences [emphasis mine] for actual rhythmic or melodic diversity and freshness. The hard bop groups utilized rhythms that are amazingly static and regular when compared to the music of the forties. (And merely calling tunes Dis Heah or dropping g’s from titles is not going to make the music more compelling.)¹⁴

From his perspective, the insertion of the rhythms, tones, and styles associated with Gospel Music in hard bop were contrived and used as mere devices rather than driving Spirit; thus, this Jazz style is not informed by the fullness of Gospel Music. The fourth mention of Gospel Music comes as Jones continues his cryptic critique of hard bop, asserting that “the ‘tonal centers’ of this music, especially as influenced by ‘pseudo-gospel harmonies,’ are so predictable and flat that in this context even the gifted improvisers began to sound dull.”¹⁵

 Once more, what is lacking is a definition of Gospel Music, a discussion of its elements, history, and development, and examples of what Gospel Music looks and sounds like in its own spaces and when successfully used to revitalize contemporary Jazz music. An obvious point to launch such a discussion would have been the chapter “The City,” where Jones chronicles the impact of the Great Migration on the development of Jazz and Blues in the North during the years between the world wars. The section on the Great Depression and the production and popularity of Jazz and Blues performers at the end of that chapter begs most for attention to Gospel Music.¹⁶ For it was during this period of austerity that more and more of these performers began to use Blues and Jazz as catalytic agents for the creation of Gospel songs. And it was this form of Black sacred music that would continually be used to renew the life and spirit of all genres of Black Music.

III
The Gospel train is coming
Gospel Music Defined

The omission of a robust discussion of Gospel Music in Blues People is even more startling when details of its origins and evolution are understood. During the first few decades of the Great Migration, as hundreds of thousands of African Americans began to leave the rural South to escape racial terrorism and poverty, they brought their sacred music with them. This music, overtly and robustly in the continuum of the African spiritual/musical tradition, yielded joyous polyrhythmic interpretations of Negro Spirituals and European hymns. It was primarily in cities beyond the Deep South, beginning as early as the 1920s, that this religious music became Gospel Music, fused very intentionally with the secular Blues and Jazz that had also made the journey up North. The Library of Congress tells us, in its Songs of America series essay “African American Gospel,”

During the 1930s, Gospel music emerged from the coalescing of three types of musical activity: a) the hymn style of Charles Albert Tindley (1851–1933)[,] a Philadelphia minister who composed hymns based on negro spirituals, adding instrumental accompaniments, improvisation, and “bluesified” third and seventh intervals; b) the minimalist, solo-sung “rural Gospel” tunes that appeared as a counterpart to the rural blues; and c) the uninhibited, exuberant worship style of the Holiness-Pentecostal branch of the Christian church.¹⁷

Historian Robert Marovich has commented on the centrality of Gospel Music to poor and working-class African American migrants from the South as they settled in urban settings and sought to adjust to and ultimately embrace their dual identity:

The duality of the migrant experience—to cling to one’s southern roots while striving to be part of the cosmopolitan northern urban black culture—was never as evident as when gospel singers and musicians swung hymns and spirituals to the steady rolling beat of urban jazz or the Hammond B3 organ. In other words, the gospel community was southern by roots, northern by circumstance, and cosmopolitan by choice.¹⁸

The schism between the Black Church of the masses and that of the middle class described by Jones is literally played out in the kind of music each embraced. Gospel Music scholar Horace Boyer has said that for the first 60 years of the twentieth century, Gospel Music was viewed as:

… the sustenance of that small group of black churches called “sanctified” or “holy rollers,” bolstered by a few Primitive and Free Will Baptist congregations, but it found no tolerance in most Methodist churches, no place in a Presbyterian choir loft, and even the thought of its performance in the sanctuaries of the Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches would have been sacrilegious.¹⁹

Although key pioneers in the development of Gospel Music included Charles Tindley and Lucie Campbell, called “the Progenitors of the Gospel Song,” by the 1960s, it was composer Thomas Dorsey, dubbed the “Father of Gospel Music,” who had made the most headway over the decades in gaining more widespread acceptance of Gospel Music in Black churches across the country and running the gamut of denominations and social classes.²⁰

Dorsey’s life personified the melding of secular and sacred music. The son of a preacher, he spent his childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, where he experienced music performed by the greats of Blues and Jazz. Then he gained wide success as a composer and performer of Jazz and Blues himself, ultimately based in Chicago. He wrote his first Gospel song in 1921 while still performing Blues and Jazz. Over the next seven decades, he wrote 2000 more. Through the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, which he founded in the 1930s, and his music publishing company, he sparked a Gospel Revolution that anchored, institutionalized, and, for many, legitimized the genre.²¹

Understanding Gospel Music of the first half of the twentieth century as an expression of the African spiritual/musical tradition that reinforced Black people’s quest for a better socio-economic quality of life during the period of the Great Migration is consistent with the socio-psychological analysis laid out in Blues People. In Chapter 4, “Afro-Christian Music and Religion,” without referring to Gospel Music by name, Jones indirectly makes the point: “And indeed, the ‘sanctified’ churches always remained closer to the African traditions than any of the other Afro-Christian sects. They have always included drums and sometimes tambourines in their ceremonies, something none of the other sects ever dared do.”²²

Perhaps a reason for the slight of Gospel Music in Blues People lay in Jones’ personal experiences within the Black Church of his past and his growing belief during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s that any African American religious institution and its music—that of the middle class or of the masses—worked more to pacify rather than ignite the Spirit in ways that could aid in the true liberation of the minds and souls of Black people. Baraka’s poem “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” published in 1975, speaks to this belief:

sing about life, not jesus

sing about revolution, not no jesus

stop singing about jesus,

sing about creation, our creation, the life of the world and fantastic

nature how we struggle to transform it, but don’t victimize our

selves by

distorting the world

stop moanin about jesus, stop sweatin and crying and stompin and dyin for jesus²³

IV
Give me that old-time religion?
LeRoi Jones and the Black, Brown, Yellow Church

In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka writes in detail about his views of Christianity as expressed in African American places of worship, which were forged during his Church experiences as a child, adolescent, and young man. The author defines the religious institutions of African Americans within a color spectrum of the Negro Community reflecting class struggle, and to some degree skin complexions, inextricably linked to the degree of connection or lack of connection to African spiritual/musical memory.

He lays out this spectrum in the chapter “Black Brown Yellow White.” The “black,” Baraka tells us, represented the masses—the underclass “ … fundamental black life, the life of blues people, the real, and the solid, and the strong, and the beautiful.” On the other hand, “the black was also the damned, the left behind, the disregarded …” ²⁴ The “brown” signifies working-class African Americans, who can teeter at various points on the threshold of the underclass or the fringe of the middle class. The “yellow” on the color spectrum represents “the artificial, the well-to-do, the middle class really.”²⁵ He elaborates on his definition of “the yellow”:

Described by a term like petty bourgeoisie with steel precision, but something else of caste was what my definition came to mean even without me understanding or saying that. The high up over the streets avoiding disaster by several hundred thousand feet and some straight hair.²⁶

Although Jones talks about the Black masses and Black Middle Class as separate, almost monolithic social constructs in Blues People, in his Autobiography he writes about the “black, brown, yellow” classes interacting and clashing “under the huge tarpaulin of the white” society.²⁷ He talks of fluidity between the colors on the spectrum: as the son of a postal worker and social worker, Baraka’s economic and social status within Black America of the period could be called solid middle class. However, he situated his family within the “brown” working class/lower middle class:

The brown was my family and me half real and half lodged in dream and shadow. They connected to reality by emotion (and logic). The walking through the streets and ambushes of that harshest reality unscathed except psychologically. The house with hidden insides and unknown wild projections.²⁸

The “brown” status could be a portal to aspects of the yellow world:

The brown was like a reserve, an exit or quick passage to somewhere else. You look up you could be getting a scholarship somewhere or shaking Joe Louis’ and Sandy Saddler’s hand or being introduced by Willie Bryant as a bright Negro child, or reciting the Gettysburg Address in a Boy Scout suit down at the Old First Church, where George Washington was and most black people wasn’t.²⁹

Baraka’s “brown,” lower middle-class family in economic and social terms attended a Church in Newark dominated by the “yellow:”

 … my grandfather was a big important man in that community or in middle-class black Newark. He was president of the Sunday School at the yellow and brown folks’ Bethany Baptist Church and a trustee … . It was as important as any position in our world, it was at least as heavy as a civil service job.³⁰

In the yellow-controlled Church, this fluidity sometimes sparked overt clashing of classes. “But dig, the struggle in that church was classic too. Class and Classic and Class-Sick struggle. The browns vs. the yellow.”³¹ Baraka recalls an ongoing rivalry between his beloved “brown” grandmother and a “yellow” matron of the Church. He cheered his grandmother’s efforts to push back against the squeezing of the last drop of African spiritual/musical memory from services. He was in the cadre of folk for whom Gospel Music became a weapon used in such battles:

And the black and the brown who they rescued from yellow death as plastic persons would be agitating for some heat, some feeling and description of themselves, not going to white heaven so much as crossing that Jordan and escaping finally from the horrible pain. They wanted the old worn hymns, the sorrow songs, and gospel, some modern stuff. Me, grandma and Sarah Vaughn’s mother were a part of that cadre.³²

Yet even as he championed “that old time religion” expressed through the heat of Gospel and other Black sacred music, Jones’ contemplation of escape from the Church had begun: “ …  a lot of us were leavin the church (even while we sat in there bein pinched by brown grandmas),” he reveals, “leavin it to yellow folks or black and brown fantasy folks who still wanted to sit on the porch rockin endlessly to familiar groans strainin and squintin they eyes tryin to look into the nothin mist for a sign that Jordan was close on or that Angels was actually motorin our way in those sweet chariots we sang about.”³³

His disdain for the “white” forms of worship and music he was subjected to in the yellow Church forever colored his opinion of Christianity, for he believed it set him on “a trajectory of ignorance.” Still, according to Baraka, it was Gospel Music that offered him solace within the yellow Church and later in the world: “ … . the gospel itself was an urban spiritual that wanted to bring blues right on into the church and forget the devil sposed have something to do with it.”³⁴

Even as he lived in a “brown” home (with “yellow” undertones), and as he ventured out, mingled, and felt most at ease in the “black” community of the Blues people of Newark, as a youth, Jones felt torn between the extremes of vibrant “black life” and the bland but seductive “white” world—“with the middle two,” brown and yellow classes, “their boxing gloves.”³⁵

Perhaps in some measure, this early multiplicity explains both his foray into and then success in the Beat world and his later rejection of that environment to immerse himself in Black Culture and become a major progenitor of the Black Arts Movement. But what was the deeper meaning and influence of Gospel Music, according to LeRoi Jones? Though he does not answer the question in Blues People, he turned a bit more attention to it five years later.

V
Gospel had another added life and memory, a harder pulse
In Praise of Gospel Music

In his 1968 collection of essays Black Music, a sequel to Blues People, Baraka—still as LeRoi Jones—seems to attempt to reconcile some of the conflicted feelings that may have prevented him from engaging in direct discussion of Gospel Music previously. However, the primary focus of this collection is the role of African spiritual/musical memory in the continued evolution of Jazz. Additionally, here Jones devotes considerable attention to the development and impact of R&B, and its performers—understandable given the popularity and impact of this new music born of Black sacred music, Blues, and Jazz, and inspired by the struggle for civil and human rights in America.

 While there is no analysis of Gospel Music, there are almost a dozen overt references and brief discussions of Gospel Music in Black Music scattered primarily in the 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” The most thoughtful of these nuggets is his recognition of the impact of the “father of Gospel Music” Thomas Dorsey:

But the gospel singers have always had a more direct connection with the blues than the other religious singers. In fact, gospel singing is a city blues phenomenon, and Professor Thomas Dorsey, who is generally credited with popularizing the gospel form back in Chicago in the late twenties and thirties, was once a blues singer-piano player named Georgia Tom, and even worked with Ma Rainey. (He was last known to be arranging for Mahalia Jackson, who with Ray Charles at another much more legitimate and powerful level, were the popularizers of Black church sound in “popular” music during the 50’s).³⁶

While in Blues People, he denies the true impact of Gospel Music on attempts by Black Jazz musicians to invent an authentic hard bop sound, now in the Black Music essay “The Changing Same,” he praises Gospel Music as the savior of Jazz. “In fact,” he writes, “it was the Gospel and soul-funk influence, especially as sung by Ray Charles and played by people like Horace Silver, that ‘rescued’ the music from the icebox of cool jazz … .”³⁷ Jones now calls Gospel Music “the strongest and healthiest influence” on Jazz and R&B in the 1950s during “the funk-groove-soul revival.”³⁸

Jones also identifies the same persistent threat to Gospel Music that has confronted other genres of Black Music for decades: the appropriation or “covers” of the music by whites. (Such thievery is not to be confused with legitimate mutually agreed upon collaborations between white and Black artists and producers/promoters in which the true origin of the music is openly acknowledged and Black originators are praised and fairly compensated for their contributions.)

It could be argued that his mention in Black Music of the cooptation of Gospel Music in the 1950s for economic gain for a white-owned night club called The Sweet Chariot, for example, presaged concerns about pervasive appropriation and commodification of Gospel by European Americans in more recent years.³⁹ Given his keen understanding of the pilfering of Blues, Jazz, and R&B over time, it was probably not surprising to Baraka that in the twenty-first century, music born of the African spiritual/musical tradition has to be referred to specifically as Black or African American Gospel Music to distinguish it from the Southern Gospel Music of whites.

From another angle, Baraka came to understand that overt exploitation aside, the pervasive infusion and influence of Africanisms in American Culture through the music as well as language, art, and other creative expressions of Black America have also been organic, naturally occurring phenomena that “are not limited to Black people but indeed American Culture, itself, is shaped by and includes a great many Africanisms.”⁴⁰

In Baraka’s collection of essays Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, published in 2009, he goes a step further to assert that even the “covers” of Black Music by whites “were conduits disseminating the music even deeper into the mainstream US culture, even though created as an expression of political and socio-economic domination.”⁴¹ Moreover, Baraka reiterates that the continued use specifically of elements of Gospel Music by Black musicians in all genres is a weapon against appropriation and economic exploitation of Black Music:

But again, the most advanced stream of African American music had already created an antidote for the commercialism: “Hard Bop.” This style went back to the black church, particularly in its gospel voice (the mating of the spiritual with the blues). “Soul,” “Funk,” the basic historical spirituality of the African American culture was summoned to reclaim the music from white supremacy and commercial destruction.⁴²

Though still lacking a full definition, he at least refers to the “gospel voice (the mating of the spiritual with the blues).”⁴³ Although brief, even cryptic, there are many more fleeting references to Gospel Music sprinkled throughout Digging than in either Blues People or Black Music. Most of these references speak to the enduring, restorative power of the genre. For example, Baraka talks about Gospel singing groups as the forerunners of R&B quartets:

The quartets were carried directly through the church. The drumless harmonies of praise and survival. We knew the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, the Southernaires, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Five Blind Boys, that gospel had another added life and memory, a harder pulse. [emphasis mine]⁴⁴

Conclusion

Amiri Baraka never really shared his reason for only making a few passing references to Gospel Music in Blues People. Ultimately, besides being a result of his negative experiences and views about the institutions of Afro-Christianity, it might well have been because even though there was a revolution in Gospel Music going on in the early 1960s, the profundity and full power of this sacred music was not yet fully realized. Then, too, the passing references might, in part, be a function of the fact that while undoubtedly a visionary, the then twenty-something LeRoi Jones had not reached his full maturity as a cultural critic. In the introduction to the 1999 edition, Baraka says, “Actually Blues People is a beginning text.” He calls for more robust and continuous “scholarly and artistic institutionalization” of Black Music:

It needs not only to further illuminate the obscure history but to bring all the voices, the contributors, the pioneers, the innovators, the unknown and little-known facts, and people up front where they belong. The actual stages and dimensions of the music’s development—how and where and why and by whom and with what historical impact—must still be reconstructed.⁴⁵

It is true that the scattered comments about Gospel Music in Leroy Jones’ Blues People are not as in-depth and revelatory as his explorations of Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, or R&B. (And, yes, he even vehemently condemns all music of the Black Church in some of his poetry.) However, Jones/Baraka did not totally dismiss or denigrate Gospel Music Dorsey in Blues People, in his subsequent studies of Black Music, or in his day-to-day life. On the contrary, despite his personal issues with Christianity and the Black Church, throughout his life, he listened to Gospel Music, understood its value, and, later in life, even enjoyed it.⁴⁶

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clarissa Myrick-Harris

Clarissa Myrick-Harris is a professor of Africana studies, former dean and associate provost at Morehouse College. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of race, class, culture, and gender in the quest for social justice, with emphasis on leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. She is currently the editor and a contributor for the forthcoming book Keep Pushing! The Atlanta Student Movement—From Quest for Human Rights to Demand for Black Power.

Notes

1 LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 1999; 2002), 42.

2 In 1968, LeRoi Jones adopted the Islamic faith and changed his name to Imamu Amear Baraka. He later dropped the title Imamu—spiritual leader—and became Amiri Baraka.

3 See James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Fayetteville: Seabury Press, 1972). See also a discussion of the impact and influence of, and the continued controversy over, Blues People in Eugene Holley, “Black History Meets Black Music: ‘Blues People’ At 50.”A Blog Supreme, NPR Jazz, July 26, 2013, https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2013/07/26/205541225/black-history-meets-black-music-blues-people-at-50 (accessed June 5, 2023); and Jelani Cobb, “The Path Cleared by Amiri Baraka,” The New Yorker, January 15, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-path-cleared-by-amiri-baraka (accessed June 2, 2023).

4 Jones, Blues People, 48; 122–41.

5 E. Franklin Frazier, The Black Bourgeoisie (Reprint; New York: Free Press, 1997).

6 Ibid, 58.

7 See Joseph E. Holloway, Africanisms in American Culture, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Antebellum Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976; repr. 1993); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

8 Jones, Blues People, 41.

9 Ibid, 47.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid, 49, emphasis in the original.

12 Ibid., 58.

13 Ibid., 216.

14 Ibid., 217.

15 Ibid., 226.

16 Ibid., 95–121.

17 “African American Gospel,” The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America, https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-and-essays/musical-styles/ritual-and-worship/african-american-gospel (accessed May 26, 2023).

18 Robert M. Marovich, A City Called Heaven: Music in American Life (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, Kindle Edition), p. 3.

19 Horace Clarence Boyer, “Contemporary Gospel Music,” The Black Perspective in Music 7, no. 1 (Spring, 1979): 5.

20 Ibid.

21 Horace Boyer, “Take My Hand Precious Lord, Lead Me On,” and Michael W. Harris, “Conflict and Resolution in the Life of Thomas Andrew Dorsey,” both in We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering Gospel Composers, ed. Bernice Johnson Reagon (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) 141–63; 165–82.

22 Jones, Blues People, 43.

23 Amiri Baraka, “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” in Hard Facts: Amiri Baraka, 1973–1975, 2nd ed. (Newark, NJ: People's War, 1975), pp. 6–9. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1a/hard-facts.pdf (accessed August 4, 2023).

24 Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, 3rd Edition (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997) 54.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid, 57.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid, 56.

30 Ibid, 18–9.

31 Ibid, 57.

32 Ibid, 58.

33 Ibid, 795.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid, 67.

36 LeRoi Jones, Black Music: Essays by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1968; New York: Akashi Classics: Renegade Reprint Series, 2010), Kindle Edition, pp. 186–187.

37 Ibid. p. 198.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Baraka makes this observation in the introduction to the 1999 edition of Blues People, xi.

41 Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), Kindle Edition, loc. 562.

42 Ibid.,1064.

43 Ibid., 1065.

44 Ibid., 1436–8.

45 Jones, Blues People.

46 In a 2017 article Amiri Baraka’s widow, Amina Baraka, is quoted as saying that he had enjoyed listening to “mostly jazz and blues and gospel … .” See John Morrison, “The Musical Legacy of Amiri Baraka,” Red Bull Music Academy,https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/03/amiri-baraka-feature (accessed July 7, 2023).