title: Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from it.
author: LeRoi Jones
description: Blues People is a seminal study of Afro-American music by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963. In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music.
zlib_text: ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  # The Awakening of the Negro
  
  
  ### Booker T. Washington
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  WHEN a mere boy, I saw a young colored man, who had spent several years in
  school, sitting in a common
  
  
  cabin in the South, studying a French grammar. I noted the poverty, the
  untidiness, the want of system and thrift,
  
  
  that existed about the cabin, notwithstanding his knowledge of French and
  other academic subjects. Another time,
  
  
  when riding on the outer edges of a town in the South, I heard the sound of a
  piano coming from a cabin of the
  
  
  same kind. Contriving some excuse, I entered, and began a conversation with
  the young colored woman who was
  
  
  playing, and who had recently returned from a boarding-school, where she had
  been studying instrumental music
  
  
  among other things. Despite the fact that her parents were living in a rented
  cabin, eating poorly cooked food,
  
  
  surrounded with poverty, and having almost none of