LeRoi Jones is already familiar to New Yorkers as the author of some sensational little plays, and to readers of poetry as the author of some sensational little poems, and if his book [Blues People: Negro Music in White America] fails to be sensational, it is not because he has tried to keep it from being so, but because his accommodation of his subject has been couched—bedded down, in fact—in that language of all languages most refractory to sensationalism: the latest jargon of the social sciences. It is almost French, Mr. Jones's enterprise, if we think of the ways Parisian intellectuals have of investing a complex popular phenomenon like the movies with whatever intellectual forces they happen to have lying around; and though Mr. Jones's tone is one of letting the chips fall where they may—off his or anyone else's shoulders—his effort is analogously strenuous…. (p. 403)
The undertaking has less, evidently, to do with information than with public speaking…. Yet this fancy-talk of the social sciences is not used to describe or even to analyze, but to condemn and to despise. There are times when the belief in original virtue, a concept Mr. Jones has invented to oppose the original sin of being Black in White America, sounds either histrionic or professional, and in Blues People, for all its clever discussions of Armstrong and Beider-becke, Bebop and Swing, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman (the way out, these last, of "overused Western musical concepts"), Mr. Jones does little more than attempt to create a system or dogma of evil and innocence by sheer classroom oratory. Unfortunately he makes this attempt in the very language of the "deadeningly predictable mind of white America". (pp. 403-04)
Richard Howard, in Poetry (© 1965 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), March, 1965.
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