SOURCE: A review of 'Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature', in Melus, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1985, pp. 97-102.

In the following review of Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Study, Tracy takes exception to author Houston A. Baker's assertion that the blues exist solely as an anthropological record of African-American experiences.}

In The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, Houston A. Baker, Jr. applied what Leonard B. Meyer termed the "anthropology of art"—"methods and models drawn from a number of intellectual disciplines"—as a corrective to the nationalist idealism of the writers of the Black Aesthetic. He wished to demonstrate that Blacks imposed a linguistic order on the upheaval and chaotic experience precipitated by their confrontation with the network of Western values, both retaining and expressing culturally unique meanings. In his new volume, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Study, Baker departs from his tactics of...