Such was the blues
of Langston Hughes xxxx
What was the blues
of Langston Hughes?

Like democracy, this page is always under reconstruction

Photo: Carl Van Vechten

Jazz & Literature | PRX | Jeff Haas with Sascha Feinstein

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“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you —
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”
— Langston Hughes, Selected Poems

africawithin.com

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong … I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”
– Langston Hughes
(Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary)

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LANGSTON HUGHES FESTIVAL
The City College of New York

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2013 Langston Hughes African American Film Festival Call for Work: Films Wanted

The Langston Hughes African American Film Festival (LHAAFF) now has an online entry system available through Without a Box: at http://www.withoutabox.com/
Here’s some information about our call for Work for the 2013 LHAAFF, which begins on Saturday, April 13 and wraps up on Sunday, April 21.

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David G. Holmes named 2013 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor

Dr. Tammy Kernodle, Musicologist

Associate Professor of Musicology at Miami University School of Fine Arts

Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle, Associate Professor of Musicology (Miami University School of Fine Arts), graduated cum laude with a BM in choral music education and piano from Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia.Ms. Kernodle received a MA and PhD in Music History from Ohio State University. Her scholarship has focused mainly on various genres of African American music, American music and jazz. She has served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still, the life and religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. Her work has appeared in Musical Quarterly, American Music Research Journal, and a Jane Bernstein’s anthology addressing the contributions of women to music entitled Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds. She is the author of the biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, (Northeastern University Press) which chronicles the life and music of Williams, whose career in jazz spans six decades.

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James Baldwin on reading Hughes’ poetry
(Yale University Library)

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Langston Hughes in 1925

Langston Hughes in 1939

Photographs by Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes in 1940

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
–Langston Hughes
(“Democracy”)

Clickable

Langston Hughes

February 1, 1902~May 22, 1967

Courtesy photo

A pack of smokes, a desk, a lamp, a typewriter, a telephone, and a nimble-fingered Langston Hughes

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Courtesy photo

James P. Johnson | 1894-1955 Master stride pianist and Harlem composer of “Carolina Shout” and “The Charleston,”"You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” “Snowy Morning Blues,” symphonic scores, and further classics.

SNOWY MORNING BLUES

in tribute to James P. Johnson & Langston Hughes

New York, you know, has its New Yorks,
Manhattan her Queens, the Bronx
keepers of flames with all their names intact.
Now that’s a fact. Upside it, though,
you’ll put your heart and everything
you know or thought you knew of snow.

When Snowy Morning Blues plays James P. Johnson’s
game of catch-me-if-you-can, you can. He could, too.
New York ain’t no last word, you know.
Nothing’s what it used to be. And you, the you who sees
out past the end of the world, this snow, this wee wind-
fall he fells us with under eaves the way we all fall
under suspicion in detective movies.
Blam! Blame it on the blues, blame it on a blizzard.

Diamonded, grounded in its ice cream crisscross,
snow makes you take to the country again, harmonica in hand,
craving the guitar of a pianistic You-Gotta-Be-Modernistic
genius — you can’t get into this. Let snow tell its own story.
Let the blues roll on. Let snow fall right on time this time
blue, blank, blackening the city-within-a-city christened
in Dutch: Harlem, Haarlem,
Haaaarrrrrlem.
Vermeer, beware.

— Al Young

© 2001, 2006 and 2007 by Al Young
from The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000;
reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry

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Historic photo

Langston Hughes in Lawrence, Kansas: Photographs & Biographical Resources
by Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso

Langston Hughes, the great American poet who inspired the Harlem Renaissance, spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. Authors Denise Low and T.F. Pecore Weso assemble photos & new research about Lawrence sites associated with Langston Hughes. Hughes lived with his grandmother in Lawrence much of the time from his birth in 1902 until his grandmother’s death in 1915. Because of the efforts of Lawrence preservationists, many of the structures are still standing.

LANGSTON HUGHES at PAL
(Perspectives in American Literature):
A Research and Reference Guide
An Ongoing Project
© Paul P. Reuben

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Langston Hughes, the busboy-poet, Washington, DC, early 1920s

« Read the 1967 NY Times obituary account of how busboy on-duty Langston Hughes got “discovered” after he slipped three poems under poet Vachel Lindsay’s luncheon plate at the Wardman Park Hotel, where young Hughes worked. »

Visit the website of DC’s Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore, fair trade market and gathering place, where people can discuss issues of social justice and peace. Each Busboys and Poets location should enhance the community — allowing us to bring together a diverse clientele reflective of the surrounding neighborhoods. Busboys and Poets creates an environment where shared conversations over food and drink allow the progressive, artistic and literary communities to dialogue, educate and interact. Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place.

First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas “Andy” Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. After opening, the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW (Washington DC), the neighboring residents and the progressive community, embraced Busboys, especially activists opposed to the Iraq War. Busboys and Poets is now located in three distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers.

BRASS SPITTOONS

by Langston Hughes

Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the smoke in hotel lobbies,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey, boy!
A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar,
Two dollars a day.
Hey, boy! A nickel,
A dime,
A dollar, Two dollars
Buys shoes for the baby.
House rent to pay.
Gin on Saturday,
Church on Sunday.
My God!
Babies and gin and church and women and
Sunday all mixed up with dimes and dollars
and clean spittoons and house rent to pay.
Hey, boy!
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord,
Bright polished brass like the cymbals
Of King David’s dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
A clean spittoon on the altar of the Lord.
A clean bright spittoon all newly polished –
Come ‘ere, boy!

© Estate of Langston Hughes

This spittoon-shaped poem first appeared in New Masses, December 1926; reprinted in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.

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Al Young comments:
Reading in my late teens I Wonder As I Wander — Langston Hughes’ autobiographical follow-up to The Big Sea – I was enthralled and inspired by the tales he weaves of his travels throughout the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the USSR, Soviet Asia, and China. One of Hughes’ lingering memoirs describes a voyage that he and 20 other African Americans took to Russia during the Great Depression to make a movie called Black and White. While his 1956 account of this episode does not match up with documents lately uncovered in the U.S. and in Russia, Hughes’ socio-romantic flashback lives on in imagination. This sunny picture invites us to peer into the faces of some amazingly contemporary-looking passengers, who made that fabled crossing: Langston Hughes with his friends aboard the Europa-Bremen, June 17, 1932. Seated front center from left to right are Louise Thompson Patterson and Dorothy West. On board ship was also Ralph Bunche, who was visiting Paris with Alain Locke.

Photograph courtesy of Yale University Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Hughes poses with neighborhood kids in the cramped, flowering confines of what they called “Our Block’s Childrens Garden” — and long before seed-leasing and genetic modification became commonplace.

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AVAILABLE BOOKS BY LANGSTON HUGHES ~ Compiled by Google

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Day One of the Joseph McCarthy committee’s interrogation of Langston Hughes
( March 24, 1953)

AP Photos

Langston Hughes testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 26 March 1953. Hughes was forced to appear before the House of Un-American Activities. He refused to name the names of other radicals and denied he had ever been a member of the American Communist Party, but he did agree to let particular poems drift from his active repertoire.

• POLITICS AND POETRY Hughes viewed through the prism of Red Scare America
  Excerpt from The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume II (1941-1967)
  © 1988, 1989, 2002 by Arnold Rampersad

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© Roy DeCarava

SHIRLEY EMBRACING SAM, 1952

Gelatin Silver Print by Roy DeCarava

Nothing in black and white to decipher, no diction
to master, just the tenderest picture – pur fiction.
While Captain Marvel’s alter ego shouted “Shazam!”
Shirley was throwing her arms around Sam.
Not only this: her fresh-done air deserves a kiss,
too, just because a hug, well, how can you miss
your target when you know you know your man?
Sam, he looks like he might have some other plan
up that soft, slow sleeve he is suddenly knuckling.

To keep their domestic economy from buckling,
Korea waged war on Korea. General Ike held forth,
while America glazed over her own South-North
struggle. “Are you now or have you ever been?”
Senator Joseph McCarthy, ugly as homemade sin,
asked over and over and over again. “You can tell
just by looking at him,” Shirley told Sam. “Hell,”
Sam said, “I can tell he prejudiced by the way he talk.
He knows who to strike out, he knows who to walk.”

On some jukebox down the street Roy Hamilton sang
“You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The new song rang
up through the window and rested on Sam’s mind.
Just back happy from his Saturday morning grind
(a job is a job is a job), he’s gotten home early,
even to his own delight. And there stood Shirley,
fragrant, glad to see him again, to have him to herself
for the rest of the weekend. There on a dusted shelf
in the next room, the kitchen, next to the dream-book,
she’s got two tickets for them. Tonight she’ll cook
his favorite supper: meatloaf, rice and butterbeans.

Tonight they’ll duck out on these domestic scenes
their pal Roy DeCarava likes to hang out and shoot.
They’ll put on the dog, get up off some loot,
sip them some Four Roses, some cold Champ Ale.
The dress in the closet she bought at that sale,
Shirley will put the thing on and let her hair down.
Clean, these two have been known to clown.
They’ll go out and party, catch them some Dinah –
the hell with Korea, the U.S., McCarthy, Red China!
Did Shirley go curl her hair just for Sam? Partly.
Will they miss church tomorrow? No, not hardly.

Al Young
© 2001 and 2006 by Al Young

from Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006 reprinted in Something About the Blues: An Unusual Collection of Poetry Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, this poem was composed to celebrate the beautiful, yea-saying spirit of “Shirley Embracing Sam,” one of the many Roy DeCarava photographs that illustrate Langston Hughes’ text for The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book for younger readers published after the poet’s death.

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Associated Press

Poets Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes, New York 1952

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Gwendolyn Brooks with Langston Hughes, promoting The Poetry of the Negro (1746-1949), Chicago 1949
Courtesy University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne

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Snapshot of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and James Baldwin

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Partial draft typescript of “Harlem” with the poet’s handwritten corrections
Courtesy Kennedy Center

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In 1958, in sessions produced by Leonard Feather, Langston Hughes recorded some of his poetry with one band led by Charles Mingus, and another led by trumpeter Henry Red Allen.
Click here to sample Langston Hughes reading ‘Consider Me’ with the Mingus ensemble

• Critic Alan Kurz’s review of Consider Me, a portion of the Hughes/Mingus collaboration

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Langston Hughes on his Harlem doorstep, 1958
Courtesy Columbia University

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© Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes — the suave Ellingtonian, circa 1959

DINNER GUEST: ME

I know I am
The Negro Problem
Being wined and dined,
Answering the usual questions
That come to white mind
Which seeks demurely
To Probe in polite way
The why and wherewithal
Of darkness U.S.A. —
Wondering how things got this way
In current democratic night,
Murmuring gently
Over fraises du bois,
“I’m so ashamed of being white.”

The lobster is delicious, The wine divine,
And center of attention
At the damask table, mine.
To be a Problem on Park Avenue at eight
Is not so bad.
Solutions to the Problem,
Of course, wait.

Langston Hughes
© Estate of Langston Hughes

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Draft typescript facsimile: The Ballad of Booker T.

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Joseph McNair

in a band of poets

for langston hughes

but someday, somebody’ll
stand up & talk about me
& write about me
black & beautiful
& sing about me …
— from “note on commercial theatre”

in a band of poets u’d have been the lead;
yr gorgeous tone & phrasing, yr range & deceptive speed
would dazzle longhead jazzers in some harlem cabaret;
even haughty hipsters would stop to check yr play
& everyone who heard would feel yr need.

 in a pride of lions u’d have been the first to feed;
the alpha lion, yr dominance would let you seed
the pride with yr issues. u’d certainly have yr way
in a band of poets.

blending mood & rhythm, u did skillfully succeed
to scale the racial mountain. joy turned to ecstasy indeed
when yr poems, racial in theme & treatment, made way
for the blues & bebop to set the cadence; to sashay
like a buck & wing; a fresh new laureate to read
in a band of poets.

 

©  Joseph McNair | Asili Press Inc.
on Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 8:55pm

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A GAY PERSPECTIVE

Bronze Buckaroo’s remarkable blog:
The Life of Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes’ liner notes for the 78 rpm album, Josh White Sings Easy (1943)

Josh White as drawn by David Stone Martin
Visit Stefan Wirz’s stunning German-based music site for an extensive Josh White discography compiled by Wirz and featured on the web site of Josh White, Jr.

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Langston Hughes by Gordon Parks

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Click here to read all of Steve Smith’s New York Times review of Langston Hughes’ Ask Your Mama

© Ari Mintz for the New York Times

L~R: Tracie Luck and Jessye Norman in “Ask Your Mama!” at Carnegie Hall in March of 2009

Music Review | ‘Ask Your Mama!’

Playing Langston Hughes’s Jazzy Verse

By STEVE SMITH

Published: March 17, 2009 The New York Times Among the challenges confronting any composer intent on setting to music “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,” a set of poems completed by Langston Hughes in 1961, probably the most daunting is that Hughes already called the tunes. His dazzling poems, by turns earnest, raffish and folksy, bulge with references to famous musicians and familiar sounds. Alongside verse set entirely in capital letters, Hughes provided detailed musical cues, some referring to specific songs or instruments, others pointing to general modes and tones. Hughes, who began the work while attending the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, reportedly planned to create a musical version with the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, among others, but died before seeing it through …

Click here to continue

© 2009 The New York Times

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Poet Karren LaLonde Alenier on Holly Bass,
Washington Música Viva, and
‘Channeling Langston’

A youthful Washington Música Vivaperforms the poetry of Langston Hughes to original music composed by Charles Mingus (with new music by Charley Gerard). Holly Bass, reader; Pepe González, bass; John Kamman, guitar; Chris Royal, trumpet; Carl Banner, piano; Charley Gerard, alto saxophone; and Harold Summey, drums ~ 2008.

Click here to peep what Michon Boston had to say on the occasion of Langston Hughes’ 107th birthday in January of 2009. Citing a passage from The Big Sea, the first of Hughes’ two engrossing memoirs, the poet-performer quotes the poet on his early 20th century assessment of Washington, DC’s “colored aristocracy,” a social class later redubbed the “black bourgeoisie.”

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From an early age, Langston Hughes heard and spoke Spanish, a language he loved; acquired during extended visits to his father’s estate in Mexico. Later as a working expatriate in France, Hughes learned and studied French, the international language then crucial to aspiring writers. An avid translator, he rendered into English work by Spain’s Federico García Lorca, Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, and Haiti’s Jacques Roumain.

Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes, Havana, circa 1950

Towne Street Theatre
4101 Budlong Avenue #4
Los Angeles, CA 90037

Phone 213.624.4796 / FAX 323.294.0507
info@townestreet.org

Baltimore Afro-American Archives

 

L-R ~ An aloof Langston Hughes poses with Soviet proletarian writer Mikhail Soltzov, Ernest Hemingway, and Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén in Madrid, 1938. As foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Afro-American, Hughes was covering the Spanish Civil War.

• Weblog of the American Literary Translators Association Langston Hughes Panel
  Saturday, October 21, 2006

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Escuche el Blues Abatido / Listen to the Weary Blues

Escuche el Blues AbatidoPoemas de Langston Hughes traducidos al castellano por Jorge Heredia

Blues/Blues Abatido www.jorgeheredia.com

“The Weary Blues,” escrito por Langston Hughes en 1923, incorpora las características musicales del Jazz, y de los Blues en la poesía. Hughes fue uno de los impulsores del conocido como Renacimiento de Harlem, un movimiento que se caracterizaba por la imitación de los sonidos e improvisaciones del jazz en la poesía.

EL BLUES ABATIDO

Zumba una melodía somnolienta y sincopada
Meciéndose adelante y atrás en un canto suave,
Escuché un negro tocar. La otra noche en la avenida Lenox
Bajo la penumbra pálida de una vieja luz de gas
Se balanceaba lento… Se balanceaba lento…
Al compás de este Blues Abatido.
Sus manos de ébano sobre las teclas de marfil
Haciendo gemir al pobre piano con melodías.
¡Oh Blues!
Balanceándose en su taburete desvencijado
Tocaba esa melodía tan triste como un tonto musical
¡Dulce Blues! Sale del alma de un hombre negro.
¡Oh Blues! Con una voz profunda canta ese tono melancólico
Escuché un negro cantar, y ese viejo piano que gime—
“No tengo a nadie en este mundo,
No tengo nadie más que yo.
Ya es es hora de dejar esta cara
Y guardar mis problemas.”
Pum, pum, pum golpeó el suelo con el pie.
Tocó algunos acordes y después cantó un poco más —
“Tengo el Blues Abatido Y no me puedo contentar.
Tengo el Blues Abatido
Y no me puedo contentar—
Nunca más seré felíz quisiera morír.”
Hasta bien entrada la noche canturreó esa melodía.
Las estrellas salieron y también la luna.
El cantante dejó de tocar y me fui a la cama con el
Blues Abatido todavía en la cabeza.
Durmió como una roca o un hombre que estaba muerto.

Spanish translation © Jorge Heredia

THE WEARY BLUES

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull of the pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway…
He did a lazy sway…
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with that melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan –
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t go nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more –
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied –
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”

And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Langston Hughes
© Estate of Langston Hughes

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In POETRY SPEAKS Expanded (edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby) Al Young introduces Langston Hughes

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I’ve been a singer:
     All the way from Africa to Georgia
     I carried my sorrow songs.
     I made ragtime.
-–Langston Hughes (“Negro”)

© Eric Lafforgue | www.ericlafforgue.com

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Drowning Saxophone | © Eric Drooker

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Always under reconstruction

Subatomic preon particles ||| Billiard balls in motion

Celebrating Black History 365/24/7

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