"It is impossible to say 'slavery created blues' and be done with it — or at least it seems almost impossible to make such a statement and sound intelligent saying it," wrote Amiri Baraka in Blues People (buy now). "Yet this kind of oversimplification has created a whole intellectual climate for the appreciation of blues music in this country."

Blues People isn't exactly a beach read: it's a precise, probing, academic examination of the history of African American music. It's hard to put down, though, because its subject matter is so essential and, for many of today's music fans, so under-examined. As Baraka indicates, it's absurd to think that because you know slavery brought Africans to America, that fact somehow provides a key for understanding everything about Black American music. As the book's subtitle, Negro Music in White America, indicates, the various forms of Black music in America have emerged from the ever-changing challenges of enduring racism and segregation as history passes and the realities of society and technology change.

Every once in a while for the Rock and Roll Book club, we set new titles aside and go back to spotlight a classic. This summer, amid a movement to elevate Black experiences across all American communities, I realized it was high time to remedy an omission from my reading history and sit down with Blues People, a book published in 1963 by an author then known as LeRoi Jones.

Jones was a fascinating figure in mid-century American arts and culture. Born in 1934, he grew up in Newark and fell in love with jazz. After studying at institutions including Howard and Columbia Universities, he joined the Air Force and left disgusted with the military's institutional racism. Having begun to write poetry, he moved to Greenwich Village and joined the Beat scene; he and his wife founded a press that published the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

He would go on to be a fiery, influential writer in the Black Arts movement of the later '60s and adopted a new name as part of the same Afrocentric philosophy that gave rise to the holiday of Kwanzaa. His life and work were not without controversy, to say the least; most notably, he was criticized for anti-Semitism, admitting some early mistakes and repudiating them in 1980. After a long career that included a 2002 collaboration with the Roots — "Something In the Way of Things (In Town)" — he died in 2014.

To fully appreciate the importance of Blues People, you have to put yourself in 1963. The Civil Rights Movement is transforming America, the Folk Revival is in full swing, and many Americans — of all races — are developing a strong interest in the roots of Black music. Imagine what someone might say standing in the back of the room during a Greenwich Village gig by a veteran blues singer in 1963, and you can see where Baraka might have thought, "Listen, it's a lot more complicated than that. I'd better write a book."

Though relatively short at 240 pages, the book is incredibly wide-ranging. It begins with Black Americans' arrival on slave ships, profoundly disconnected from the language and culture of their captors. As Baraka notes, they brought work songs, but were now singing them in a mournful context. "The lyrics of a song that said, 'After the planting, if the gods bring rain/ My family, my ancestors be rich as they are beautiful,' could not apply in the dreadful circumstance of slavery."

The unwilling immigrants also brought an entirely different system of music, based on polyrhythms and a fundamentally different scale of notes. The name of the "blues" comes from the notion that a musician who slides around a note rather than hitting it directly is said to be "bluing" the note. That concept, though, suggests that there is such an objective thing as "the note" on "the scale." Instead, suggests Baraka, consider that, say, C is a note on a scale. If you're used to singing a totally different scale, of course you're going to sound kind of "blue."

As generations passed and living memories of Africa faded, the continent remained as a distant promised land; Black and white cultural traditions began to merge, and African Americans who practiced Christianity began to identify the lost homeland of the ancient Jews with their own lost homeland. Thus the resonance of a song like "Mary Don't You Weep," with the singer wishing to "stand on the rock where Moses stood." When Spike Lee heard Prince's rendition of that song, he knew it would be the perfect, powerful performance to close his 2018 film BlacKkKlansman.

The book goes on to chronicle the emergence of jazz, which came about in New Orleans (though not just there, as Baraka makes a point of clarifying) when Black Americans playing African instruments intersected with white marching bands toting the likes of tubas, clarinets, and trombones. A new genre of music incorporated African and European rhythms, with a wide range of styles and venues.

Finally we arrive at "classic blues": vocal blues created for professional staged performance and, later, recording. Baraka identifies the tension in classic blues: "It was the first Negro music that appeared in a formal context as entertainment, though it still contained the same harsh, uncompromising reality as the earlier blues forms." The definitive early performers of classic blues were women: "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith among others. In a patriarchal society where women were typically excluded from the most remunerative among the limited economic opportunities available to African Americans, blueswomen saw a musical career as a way to gain not just income but prestige and a freedom of movement that few Black women had at that time.

Baraka follows the blues into the city during the Great Migration, where blues proliferated in cities like St. Louis and Chicago. He also points out just how tumultuous the 1910s were: between a war and a flu epidemic, society saw an upheaval not entirely dissimilar from what we're seeing now. One aspect of the period that's too little remarked upon: there were widespread race riots as Black Americans cried for the kind of freedoms they'd seen in Europe when fighting abroad.

After the war, a growing Black middle class (as well as a growing white audience) helped fuel the rise of jazz orchestras, as artists like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong moved between the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall. The years between the wars also saw the rise of the high-sheen, often white form of jazz that became big band swing. Baraka has dripping disdain for that genre, but he's absolutely fascinated with the forms of jazz that developed in circles that were more musical, more counter-cultural, and more (though not entirely) Black: bebop and "cool" jazz.

Meanwhile, the blues got rhythm. "There was a kind of frenzy and extra-local vulgarity to rhythm & blues that had never been present in older blues forms. Suddenly it was as if a great deal of the Euro-American humanist facade Afro-American music had taken on had been washed away by the war."

Writing in 1963, Baraka saw rock and roll as "a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues, but the music in many cases depends enough on materials that are so alien to the general middle-class, middle-brow American culture as to remain interesting." Baraka looked with seeming amusement at middle-class whites dismissing "low brow" rock and roll, and commented, "an Elvis Presley seems to me more culturally significant than a Jo Stafford."

By the time Baraka wrote, white America had long been proudly touting the merits of the United States' novel, increasingly popular musical forms: the music of Black Americans, the race whites had oppressed for centuries and were still actively doing. In the face of the Cold War, authorities were calling for solidarity.

"The American Negro is now being asked to defend the American system as energetically as the American white man," wrote Baraka. "What is it that they are being asked to save? It is a good question, and America had better come up with an answer."

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Upcoming Rock and Roll Book Club picks

Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

July 15: Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir by Linda Ronstadt (buy now)

July 22: Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina by Chris Frantz (buy now)

July 29: Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show by Richard Zoglin (buy now)

August 5: Larger Than Life: A History of Boy Bands from NKOTB to BTS by Maria Sherman (buy now)