“But What About Amina?”: On Blues People and the Politics of Dedication

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Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997).

2 Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Baraka’s Billie Holiday as a Blues Poet of Black Longing,” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 1055–62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26446154.

3 Ibid.

4 Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1st ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), vii.

5 Ibid.

6 Baraka,Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, xxiii.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 In the “Note to the Reader” in the 1997 edition of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Baraka describes the book as “the first complete edition,” therefore suggesting that previous editions had missing elements.

10 Sylvia Jones, Songs for the Masses (1978).

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Valerie Wilmer, As Serious as Your Life: John Coltrane and beyond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), 195.

14 Jones, Songs for the Masses.

15 Interview with Amina Baraka conducted by Naomi Extra on February 7, 2023.

16 Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka, Confirmation, an Anthology of African American Women, 1st Quill ed. (New York: Quill, 1983), 15–6.

17 Ibid.

18 Baraka and Baraka, Confirmation, 187.

19 Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka, The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 16.

20 Ibid., 134.

21 See the album Amina Baraka and the Red Microphone released in 2017 under ESP-Disk.

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Notes on contributors

Naomi Extra

Naomi Extra is a poet, writer, scholar, and cartoonist. In both her creative and her scholarly work, she explores the themes of agency and pleasure in the lives of Black women and girls. Her work can be found in places like the Boston Review, The Believer, The New Yorker, The Lily, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at Rutgers University, Newark.