When he first read Amiri Baraka’s epochal study “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” originally published in 1963, Russell Gunn felt that he already understood, on some level, the book’s urgent themes. That’s not just because “Blues People”— which centers the blues as the foundation of American music, and the lives of Black Americans as the foundation of the blues — has been widely influential, shaping public and institutional understanding of the history of the blues, jazz and American culture.
While growing up in East St. Louis in the 1970s and early ’80s, Gunn — the trumpeter, composer and bandleader — had always felt that truth already, in a way he links to ancestral memory.
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