BLACK MUSIC IN THE POETRY OF LANGSTON HUGHES: ROOTS, RACE, RELEASE

Author(s): William H. Hansell

Source: Obsidian (1975-1982) , WINTER 1978, Vol. 4, No. 3 (WINTER 1978), pp. 16-38
Published by: Board of Trustees of Illinois State University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44525684

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 BLACK MUSIC IN THE POETRY OF LANGSTON HUGHES:
ROOTS, RACE, RELEASE

William H. Hansell

In commenting on the poetry of Langston Hughes, critics unfail-

ingly emphasize his debt to Afro-American music. Critical comment
ranges from the casual observation that Hughes loved to talk about jazz
and the blues on any and all occasions ,1 to the more significant observation
of Arna Bontemps that the most distinctive elements of his poetry were
the formal and thematic borrowings from music. Bontemps, a close
friend of Hughes and himself a poet, wrote,

Hughes's art can be likened to that of Jelly Roll Morton

and the other creators of jazz. His sources are street music.
His language is Harlemese. In his way he too is an American
original. ^

In one way or another, numerous commentators have expressed agreement

with Bontemps. According to Robert Bone, jazz was the most pronounced
technical influence on Hughes's style? A more recent author of a com-
prehensive study of Hughes's poetry and prose, James A. Emanuel, extends
Bone's observation, writing that the major stylistic influences on Hughes,
which in fact determined the "major.. .emphasis" in his work, were "blues,
jazz, be-bop and boogiewoogie," 4 And Donald C. Dickinson, author of the
most complete bibliography on Hughes, has written that Hughes's considera-
ble reputation in Europe rests chiefly on "his exposition of Negro Music." 5
Despite the general acknowledgment of the centrality of music as a
formal and thematic model for a great many poems by Hughes, there
has been no extended examination of these poems.6 Toward that end,
this study, while not a formal evaluation of Hughes's transcription of
musical techniques into verse, examines a large number of poems on a
wide variety of his major themes, with the primary intention of
demonstating that Hughes wrote in accordance with his belief that poems
modeled on or associated with black music would appeal as broadly and
could serve Afro-Americans in the essentially positive ways he believed
the music itself had.
On occasion, Hughes remarked that he did not believe his poems
or black music were meaningful only to members of his race: "the Blues
have something that goes beyond race or sectional limits."? But his major
emphasis, as he wrote, was on the experiences of blacks: "most of my
poems have dealt with the memories, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the

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 fourteen million of my own people in our common country, America." ®
The importance to Hughes of faithfully portraying the racial experience
and an optimistic view cannot be overstressed; here, in his first auto-
biography, The Big Sea (1940), in his own statement:

I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh

Street-gay songs, because you had to be gay or die; sad
songs sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on living and
you kept on going. Their songs-those of Seventh Street
had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going. 8

Critics have agreed almost unanimously that in at least three important

ways Hughes was consistent in his basic intentions throughout his entire
career: his essential optimism endured; 10 he continued to be primarily
concerned with improving the conditions imposed upon the majority
of Afro-Americans; and the bulk of his most successful poetry continued
to be modeled on black music. 1 1
There is considerable support for Hughes's assumption that music
has been the most significant contribution of Afro-Americans to Ameri-
can culture and a positive influence on black life and art. 12 Near the be-
ginning of this century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the cultural contribution
of the music and argued that 'The Sorrow Songs" were probably the most
positive and dynamic contribution to American culture. Insisting folk
songs were essentially a spiritual gift and America's "most beautiful
expression of human experience," Du Bois commented upon what he
took to be their distinctive characteristics: sorrow and fear were
prominent; despair was a minor cadence; but hope was the dominant
theme. 12 Booker T. Washington, who obviously differed with Du Bois in
a number of important ways, nonetheless was in essential agreement with
him concerning the significance of the race's music:

It reminds the race of the 'rock whence it was hewn,'

it fosters race pride, and in the days of slavery it
furnished an outlet for the anguish of smitten hearts.14

Washington's summary bears restatement because it concisely expresses

ideas of Langston Hughes and a number of other more recent writers:
folk song kept the racial heritage alive, fostered positive racial conscious-
ness, and served as an alternative to frustration and despair.
In Hughes's opinion, the essential characteristics of all forms of
the black music derive from qualities inherent in Afro-Americans, and
therefore they share a common nature. He also stressed the near-identity
of qualities in the black artist and in the blues in an important early
essay:

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 ...the Negro artist offers his racial individuality,
his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous
humor that so often, as in the blues, becomes ironic
laughter mixed with tears. 15

In a much later article on "gospel singing," Hughes, as was his custom,

simply assumed the essential identity of the blues and jazz and insisted
that gospel singing possessed the same basic qualities, revealing the im-
pulses and techniques expressed vocally in the blues and instrumentally
in jazz. 16 a much more general statement of the essential identity of all
forms of black music, relies heavily on the implication that the rhythms,
emotions, and power of black song derive from nature itself:

Like the waves of the sea coming one after another, always
one after another, like the earth moving around the sun,
night, day -night, day, day-night, day--forever, so is the
undertow of black music with its rhythms that never
betrays [sic] you, its strength like the human heart, its
humor, and its rooted power. 17

In at least one comment on the blues and spirituals, however,

Hughes appears to be emphasizing basic differences in their natures, the
one sung by groups, the other by isolated individuals, the one concerned
exclusively with the afterlife, the other with this world. In The Dream
Keeper (1932), Hughes wrote: "Unlike the Spirituals, the Blues are not
group songs" (p. 30). 16 Possibly Hughes exaggerated the differences be-
tween blues and spirituals here in order to sharpen the religious-secular
contrast. In any case, his later comments on his intention are almost
diametrically the opposite. For example, in The Big Sea he clearly states
that he copied "folk-song forms," which of course include the blues,
because they are less personal and because they voice the feelings of
many. 19
Commentaries which Hughes included in two major poetry
collections written somewhat later even than the-works cited above
repeat his basically unchanged ideas concerning both the essential
identity of all black musical forms and the relationship between music
and his own poetry. In a rather playful introduction to Shakespeare
in Harlem (1942), Hughes describes his models, his intentions, and even
the response he desires from the audience:

A book of light verse. Afro-Americana in the Blues mood.

Poems syncopated and variegated in the colors of Harlem,
Beale Street, West Dallas, and Chicago's South Side. Blues,
ballads, and reels to be read aloud, crooned, shouted,

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 recited, and sung. Some with gestures, some not--as you
like. None with a far-away voice.

Inspired by music, the poems of Shakespeare in Harlem are intended to

give the reader an essentially joyful experience. A prefatory note to
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) has a somewhat different emphasis,
for here Hughes stresses the contemporaneity of his manner in producing
"the music of a community in transition":

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the

sources from which it has progressed--jazz, ragtime, swing,
blues, boogiewoogie, and be-bop--this poem on contempor-
ary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes,
sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken
rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the
jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by
the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of
a community in transition.

II

As has been said, the Afro-American's music and Hughes's poems

imitating it, served an essentially positive role, preserving aspirations and
ideals, preserving a sense of racial and cultural continuity, and providing
spiritual and emotional inspiration which helped the race to endure and
even to transcend the suffering and humiliation often imposed by Amer-
ican society. Hughes believed that participation in the music as musician,
dancer, singer, or even as audience was enough to share in the positive
effects.

In the following subject-groupings, however, the first two examine

poems portraying individuals who failed or were unable to benefit from
black music, and the last four bring together poems portraying the music's
essentially positive role in the black experience. I have elected to begin
with the "negative" poems because I believe they give an added emphasis
to the fact that deprived of the positive effects of black music, whatever
the reason, individuals lose almost all sense of their racial heritage, per-
sonal identity, and means of release from the oppressive milieu. In fact,
for Hughes, the measure of artificial and desperate lives was precisely the
absence of an authentic response to black music and, by extensipn, his
own poetry.
When criticizing those who misunderstood or abused black music,
Hughes was often attacking the same individuals who would most likely
reject his own ideas about poetry. It is not surprising, then, that when
portraying the responses of some intellectual and middle-class blacks

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to the music, contempt and satire are often the dominant tones. Through-
out his career Hughes criticized certain characteristics he attributed to
the black middle class. To take a notable instance, as early as 1926,
Hughes bluntly attacked anyone-white ör black-who argued that the
folk music lacked truly artistic qualities:

... in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and

the desire of some white editors we have an honest Ameri-
can Negro literature already with us. 20

In the context of that essay, it is clear that music is an important part

of the "honest Negro literature" often ignored or condemned by the
black middle class. Twenty-one years later, in 1947, Hughes recalled
in another essay that a middle-class minister gave him his "first experience
with censorship," when he interrupted Hughes's reading of "some blues
poems about hard luck and hard work" because he believed such poems
were not suitable for reading in church. 21
In his poetic portrayals of the black middle class, Hughes frequent-
ly emphasized the artificiality and abstractness of their lives. For example,
"Ph.D." 22 and "Teacher" 23 express the idea that a life limited to books and
abstractions is stultifying to natural impulses and needs. Another poem,
"Aesthete in Harlem," illustrates Hughes's sense that some forms of
intellectuality create an artificial response to the realities of life; but the
"authentic" experience depicted in the poem seems to impress the
"Aesthete" with the fact that his own life has been greatly deficient.24
Long before Imamu Baraka charged that the distaste of middle-class
blacks for black music was evidence of their separation from folk roots,
Hughes had portrayed their contempt for black music as evidence they
had been cut off from a vital aspect of their heritage. 25 |n "Conservatory
Student," a whimsical poem about a young saxophonist written less than
ten years before Hughes died, the student's refined taste and snobbish
sense that saxophones are for lower mentalities and classes than his strug-
gle against the instrument's appeal. 26 Finally, though, the young man
implicitly acknowledges that he had been denying himself an authentic
means of expression, and Hughes seems to suggest again that after formal
education it is necessary for many to struggle back to more vital artistic
forms. This man's rediscovery of his past echoes an admonition of Claude
McKay: "Getting down to our native roots and building up from our
own people is not savagery. It is culture." 27
Hughes obviously believed that the black middle-class rejection
of the folk musical tradition actually was more a sign of how much some
of its members had degenerated racially than a mark of their cultural
progress. Yet it should briefly be noted here that Hughes, as my dis-
cussion of history poems in particular will illustrate, definitely felt great

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pride in the accomplishments of many who were also, by attainment if
not by birth, members of the middle class. Clearly, his criticism was not
a class-war ideology, nor was he anti-intellectual or opposed to social
betterment. The often harsh intensity of his attacks on middle-class
attitudes, on the contrary, is probably a good measure of his evaluation
of the importance of music in black life, more than an absolute condem-
nation of all middle-class values. More personally, his assault on the negleci
or abuse of the music unquestionably reveals his hostility towards any
who questioned the validity and richness of a dominant influence on his
own poetry.
A minor motif in Hughes's poems is the relationship of white
men to black music. There are, in fact, several similarities between what
Hughes says about whites and what he says about middle-class blacks:
both misunderstand, adopt condescending attitudes, and fail to respond
properly. "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret" (FCJ, p. 74) presents whites
and blacks enjoying jazz, but in several robust poems Hughes protested
the tendency of whites first to steal then corrupt the music. Moreover,
whites are depicted as confused, if not flatly hypocritical, in their re-
sponses. Blacks laugh, for example, in "Negro Dancers" (TDK, p. 33)
at the solemnity and assumed righteousness of a company of sober whites
who appear offended by the behavior of the dancers, yet remain to watch.
As another poem portrays it, whites lack the sensitivity and awareness
which would allow them to participate in the right spirit. The white wo-
man in "Lady's Boogie" (MDD, p. 44) is accused of being insensitive to
the underlying sadness of the music, "the tingle of a tear" which eludes
her. In "Visitors to the Black Belt" (OWT, pp. 65-66), white people who
share the same insensitivity, who are moved only by the joyful motifs
of jazz, are castigated for their failure to understand an equally important
dimension of the music and the actual conditions of black life:

You can say

Jazz on the South Side-
To me it's hell
On the South Side. . .

But white people also steal the music, dilute it, and profit from the de-
graded version. "Note on Commercial Theatre" (OWT, pp. 79-92) gives
the specifics:

"You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones
And all kinds of Swing Mikados
And in everything but what's about me--

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 But someday somebody 'l I
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me-
Black and beautiful-
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
"I reckon it'll be
Me myself!"

Like most whites and some members of the Afro-American middle

class, there are still others who do not respond to the music, though for
quite different reasons. Music and related activities are depicted as power-
less to aid those who are already too deep in despair, or who, because of
constitutional or spiritual deficiencies, are overwhelmed by the very
means they choose to escape an oppressive and frightening reality. Overt-
ly fatalistic in a way few of his poems are, "Lenox Avenue: Midnight"
(WB, p. 39) declares

The Rhythm of life

Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey.
The gods are laughing at us.

To this narrator, jazz seems to express divine contempt for human

aspirations and problems. The futility of using jazz to escape painful
circumstances is also the theme of "Jaime" (FW, p. 84). In this poem a
musician seems to project himself out of his painful circumstances, but the
narrator's comment reveals the futility and wishful thinking in the mu-
sician-dreamer's groping for a "mirage land."
Sometimes the despair is seen as a direct result of social depriva-
tions. "Minstral Man" (TDK, p. 38) and "The Black Clown" 28 assert that
laughter, song, and dance can succeed in making and temporarily freeing
one from sorrow and pain; the danger, however, is that observers mistake
the mask for the reality. Seeing apparent joy where they would expect
to see sorrow, or perhaps anger and resentment, observers become con-
temptuous. Pity or compassion, they seem to think, would be wasted on
such people.
More significant, however, is Hughes's portrayal of the effect on
self-awareness and moral integrity of indulgence in escapist activities.
Both are seen to be diminished or obliterated so completely that any
solace cabaret life may offer becomes insignificant. "Hey-Hey Blues"
(SH, pp. 52-53), for example, depicts a superficially happy situation, but
very quickly it becomes clear that the alcohol, music, and dancing deliver
the participants not only from the blues but also from the power to make

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a moral decision: Till you don't know right from wrong." A further
danger in such a condition is seen also in "Sport" ( FCJ , p. 41 h in which
a gambler and prostitute are portrayed as totally entrapped by their
environment, literally unable to perceive a reality beyond the sordid
activities of their immediate circumstances. Death itself is simply "an
empty cabaret." Their pathetic hope of escape has become a trap from
which there seems no possible exit. Beyond the cabaret life at its worst,
they cannot imagine any other life. The same pathetic experience is re-
corded in "Saturday Night" (FCJ, p. 41), in which another Harlemite
reduced all of life to the activities of the cabaret-the music, gambling,
drinking, profanity, and whoring.
Like "Sport," "Beale Street" (RW, p. 18), although somewhat
less pessimistic in portraying the dangers of total submersion in cabaret
life, depicts a man attempting to cheer himself by reminiscing about
happier times. The problem is that the incident he tries to recall is all
but extinguished by "jazz and booze," "dice and women." Clearly, Hughes
is underscoring the fact that excessive indulgence erases more than a per-
son may wish to forget; pleasures of the past are banished along with the
sorrows. "Crowing Hen Blues" goes a step further; it describes a man
driven insane-he talks to cats-by the "high life." 29 Similarly, a poem called
simply "Blues ' (FCJ, p. 21) portrays a man who has gone beyond frus-
tration, or at least beyond fear to an attitude totally violent and brutal,
lacking any desire whatsoever to do good. A grim irony Hughes was
surely aware of in all these poems is that in seeking to find others with
whom to share their grief and momentary pleasures, these individuals
became more isolated than before and incapable of pleasure or com-
passion.
In "Blues" Hughes has depicted a response to life very much like
that described later by Norman Mailer:

Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war,

nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted)
could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civil-
ization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the prim-
itive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for
his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the
mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,
and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality
of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of
joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and
despair of his orgasm. For jazz is orgasm. 30

Unlike Mailer, however, Hughes in these poems is not speaking for "the
Negro," but about some Afro-Americans who live in an "enormous

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present." The cost to themselves, as Hughes saw it, was the loss of moral
stature, dignity, and sometimes sanity. Why Hughes, who was essentially
optimistic, would write such poems is not a mystery. As is evident from
his own statements, he desired to portray every aspect of the black ex-
perience; and we can easily acknowledge his moralistic intention of warn-
ing against self-destructive escapes. Moreover, he clearly desired to arouse
whites to a recognition of the consequences of their attitudes and practices,
with the ultimate hope that whites would change their behavior.
All these factors had a part in the creation of such poems, but
there seems to have been another, equally important, reason. Even if the
memories of such experiences stirred bitterness, Hughes apparently agreed
with Claude McKay that bitterness had been and could continue to be a
source of creative energy, in fact that, as McKay asserted, this creative
transformation of grief and denial was a significant part of the Afro-
American's "racial attributes" and art:

For out of his bitterness he has bloomed and created his

spirituals and blues and conserved his racial attributes -
his humor and ripe laughter and particular rhythm of
life. 31

Hughes likewise apparently agreed with Ellison when the latter wrote,
"The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a
brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness. . .and to transend
it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-
tragic, near-comic lyricism." 32 ßut Ellison's comment perhaps applies more
directly to the next group of poems, in which music often is the means
of transcendence of misery.
Turning to Hughes's portrayals of more positive functions
of the traditional music in black lives, one finds numerous poems in which
music is regarded as a legitimate means, even if sometimes only a
temporary one, of escaping painful conditions. This group of poems
stresses, like the music on which they are modeled, the positive
psychological or emotional effects of temporary escapes from harsh
circumstances.

Black musicians and singers are among the individuals Hughes

most freequently presents in his poems for the purpose of praising or
describing certain human qualities or simply to serve as symbols of achieve-
ment, and these black artists are sometimes portrayed as shedding their
grief through the ritual of music. 33 "The Weary Blues" (W£, pp. 23-24),
Hughes's most frequently reprinted poem, portrays a musician who

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temporarily escapes despair. Whereas the body bf the poem suggests he
has been successful in escaping his pain, in the conclusion the musician
appeals to death as the only permanent relief. It is only for the duration
of the music that he can transcend his sorrow. Similarly, the guitar player
in"Blues on a Box" (OWT, p. 1 12) is encouraged by the narrator to
play until his troubles are manageable. Song, as another poem testifies, is
the musician's response to an otherwise intractable and unresponsive
world. 34
A short poem which has been interpreted, erroneously I believe,
as the expression of a basic attitude of Hughes requires somewhat longer
comment than the poems above. "Motto" ( MDD , p. 19) succinctly ex-
presses a functional relationship between music and the attitudes some
Afro-Americans have adopted. The rhythm and manner in "Motto" are
in a jazz idiom:

I play it cool
And dig all jive
That's the reason

I stay alive.

My motto
As I live and learn, is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

Arthur P. Davis contends that this poem dramatizes a basic attitude of

Hughes. "In 'hip' speech," Davis writes, "the word coo I is often used
to describe a person who, without becoming too much involved, knows
and can, therefore, control a given situation. To lose one's cool is to
lose along with one's objectivity the mastery which the cool posture
gives. It is in this sense that I speak of Langston Hughes as a cool poet."
And Davis concludes that Hughes "remained the objective observer
and appraiser." 35 gy "control a given situation" Davis seems to mean to
have the ability to survive within an imposed situation over which one
has in fact relatively little actual control. Imamu Baraka, in defining the
"cool" attitude, somewhat differently emphasizes the "flexibility" used to
survive within a set of circumstances, which entails having the capacity
to detach oneself, morally and psychologically from responsibility, rather
than having the power to overtly guide and direct those circumstances:
"It is perhaps the flexibility of the Negro that has let him survive; his
ability to 'be cool'--to be calm, unimpressed, detached, perhaps to make
failure as secret a phenomenon as possible." 36
I do not agree that detachment and objectivity describe a life-
long attitude of Hughes himself. Since the "cool" posture was doubtless
the survival stategy of some, Hughes portrayed it; but if one were to des-
cribe Hughes's dominant attitude through a metaphor, the better one 25

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to choose, one that is more dynamic, would be that of a man fishing in
The Big Sea-the title of his first autobiography-wonder-struck before
life's infinite variety and richness. Even "Beggar Boy" (TDK, p. 23),
although it lacks the jazzed-up rhythm and diction of "Motto," expresses
a compassion and curiosity at the other extreme from cool detachment.
The poem consists principally of questions; and there is also a charac-
teristic wonder in the narrator, who marvels at a boy who has known
only squalor and poverty and pain yet plays "a wild free tune":

What is there within this beggar lad

That I can neither hear nor feel nor see,
That I can neither know nor understand
And still it calls to me?

Is not he but a shadow in the sun-

A bit of clay, brown, ugly, given life?
And yet he plays upon his flute a wild free tune
As if Fate had not bled him with her knife!

Whether this records an imaginary or an actual experience, Hughes seems

to be saying that to participate in the mystery is more important than
trying to understand it. It would seem from "Burden" (FW, p. 16), more-
over, that a singer cannot have just himself for audience; in this poem,
the isolated singer laments his solitude and falls into dejection. To truly
participate requires being involved with both the music and audience,
as this singer is not. The artist is not self-sufficient, not detached in any
aloof or indifferent sense, and must share his wonder at life.
Beyond the capacity of black music to provide necessary but
temporary release from life's problems, is its ability to provide spiritual or
emotional rejuvenation which often guides individuals to more dynamic
responses to life. "Oppression" (FW, p. 1 12), for example, describes
"dreamers" and "singers" who, although denied their aspirations by
present circumstances, are given hope in the future; and part of that hope
is embodied in their songs. Promise of defiance against evils in the present
and future is the essential message of "Still Here." 37 Despite a rather
uncertain tone, although its intention is otherwise clear enough, the pt>em
declares the refusal of blacks to accept a passive or stoic role. And that
much of Afro-American's resistance to dehumanization, which so clearly
an affirmation of life, was sustained by his music is well illustrated in
"Song" TDK, p. 41), in which the "lovely, dark, and lonely" girl, even
though confronted by a "wall," is urged to dance. "Barrel House:
Industrial City" also proclaims the need for pleasure, no matter how grim
the circumstances. The same attitude is more elaborately dramatized in
"Lincoln Theater" (OWT, p. 46).

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 The head of Lincoln looks down from the wall
While movies echo dreams on the screen.
The head of Lincoln is serenely tall
Above a crowd of black folk, humble, mean.
The movies end. The lights flash gaily on.
The band down in the pit bursts into jazz.
The crowd applauds a plump brown-skin bleached blonde
Who sings the trouble every woman has.
She snaps her fingers, slowly shakes her hips.
And cries, all careless-like from reddened lips!

De man / loves has

Gone and done me wrong. . .

While girls who wash rich white folks clothes by day

And sleek-haired boys who deal in love for pay
Press hands together, laughing at her song.

There is obviously more here than a statement of the meaningfulness of

jazz and the blues to Afro-Americans. Hollywood's false image of life
is contemptuously dismissed. 39 The irony of Lincoln's picture looking down
on a people still not free, although emotionally freer than their condition
reveals, makes its own comment. And there is more in this praiseworthy
poem. Of particular importance for this study is the fact that jazz and the
blues are shown as means to truly create happiness, and that the blues,
though the "story" is sad, stir joy in the listeners and perhaps in the singer
too. The formalizing and objectifying of grief in art creates beauty, which
evokes pleasure--this is a formula Hughes implicitly accepts here and in
other poems. 40
In poems about love and religion Hughes often drew on music for
images and metaphors. What follows is only the barest sampling of poems
on either subject, but the selection does illustrate that in these as in every
other aspect of black life portrayed by Hughes, the music functions
significantly, complementing and enhancing both love and spiritual faith.
Love is wonderfully enhanced for the woman in "My Man" by the
simple fact of her lover's considerable ability in playing the banjo; and in
"Love" (SH, p. 124), love itself is a kind of celestial song, a "wonder."
miraculously powerful. "Harlem Night Song" (SA, p. 61) is a pastoral
poem set in the city; the atmosphere surrounding the lovers is suffused
with music; and "Juke Box Love Song" (MDD, p. 10) depicts a setting for
lovers transmuted into a beautifying garment and musical tribute:

I could take the Harlem night and wrap around you,

Take the neon lights and make a crown . . .

27

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"College Formal: Renaissance Casino" (MDD, p. 41) in many respects
parallels "Juke Box Love Song." Again the music "wraps" the lovers
around, and they become, as it were, the vital center of their immediate
surroundings. 42
Many of Hughes's religious poems utilize images and metaphors
drawn from one or another form òf black music. Two critics who have
written extensively about Hughes agree that he held no formal religious
ties but was tolerant of all forms of belief. 43 His portrayal of the role music
played in the expression of religious attitudes supports such an
interpretation. Moreover, in his poetry there is clearly a very close con-
nection between secular music and religious attitudes, the secular music
sometimes becoming so thoroughly imbued with the desire to worship
God that there is almost no distinction. 44 Secular celebration and spiritual
exercise, for example, blend humorously and almost indistinguishably in
"Request for Requiems" (OWT, p. 115), in which the blues songs men-
tioned serve as epitaph and prayer.
An apocalyptic vision described in another poem and imagined in
the form of a dance facetiously portrays the joyous moment when love
and brotherhood replace social divisiveness among Afro-Americans. The
images in "Projection" (MDD, p. 26) are likely to outrage staider notions
of what the millennium will be like, but they present a vision consistent
with Hughes's unrestrained combining of secular and religious cele-
bration:

On the day when the Savoy

leaps clean over to Seventh Avenue
and starts jitterbugging
with the Renaissance,
on that day when Abyssinia Baptist Church
throws her enormous arms around
St. James Presbyterian. . .

A more orthodox religious expression is found in "Shepherd's Song at

Christmas" and several other poems. In "Shepherd's Song" an appro-
priate gift to God is a song; 45 and "Testimonial" (MDD, p. 57) declares
that musical accompaniment, although not absolutely essential, nonethe-
less enhances the worshipper's prayers in praise of God. Rhythm and song,
in the poem "Mystery" (MDD, pp. 55-56), are made to seem the very
essence of religious worship and to embody, somehow, the essential
unity of all religions.
That Hughes believed humble and commonplace attitudes and
instruments were perfectly appropriate for exalted spiritual ends is appar-
ent in 'Tambourines" (SP, p. 29) and in "Drums" (SP, p. 87). Life's
brevity and the immortality of the spirit can be celebrated by tambourines
as well as by organs, and drums can announce the departure from this
?8

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world of sorrow and entry into eternal bliss as efficaciously as harps.
"When Sue Wears Red" (TDK, p. 43) mixes the secular and religious in a
more controversial manner. The narrator's enthusiasm for the girl is
expressed in a phrase wrenched from another context: "Come with a blast
of trumpets, Jesus!" Finally, the picture of heaven given in "Reprise"
(FW, p. 115) portrays the close ties between religious ideas and secular
music, and states that in heaven song is preeminent.
In concluding this brief comment on the role of music in poems
about love and religion, it is enough, perhaps, to say that images and
metaphors drawn from music evidently seemed essential to Hughes be-
cause in the spiritual and emotional life of Afro-Americans, the traditional
musical forms did in fact figure prominently.
Early in his career Hughes desired to identify with Africa in some
way and was greatly disappointed when he visited Africa as a young mer-
chant seaman to learn that Africans considered him a white man. 46
Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, as his many historical books and
poems testify, the popularization of African culture was of the utmost
importance to him. In 1957, for example, he contributed to the founding
of the American Society of African Culture, and throughout the fifties
and sixties he repeatedly celebrated newly independent African nations.
Music as one of the Afro-American's strongest links with Africa,
in fact, is a theme in several poems; and it is indicative of the way his
interests developed that in a very early poem, "Fog," Africans are por-
trayed while singing. 48 |n "Me and My Song" Hughes celebrates physical
ties to Africa, but the poem also states that the beauty of his song derives
from Africa:

Beautiful

As the black night . . .

Black
Out of Africa,
Me and my song. 49

"Drums" reveals that besides stirring memories of former great musi-

cians, jazz inevitably arouses memories of Africa, slavery, and the South. 50
In "Jazzonia" (WB, p. 25) a Negro's exotic dance brings thoughts to the
poet of Eve and Cleopatra, both of whom, the poem implies, were black
and African. In this way of course, Hughes emphasizes the antiquity and
past glories of black men. In the same way, the "Proem" (p. 20) of The
Weary Blues deals with the historical ordeal as slave, worker, victim, but
also as singer:

I've been a singer:

All the way from Africa to Georgia
I carried my sorrow songs.
I made ragtime. 29

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Although he emphasizes the subjugation of blacks in this poem, from
Africa and the Caesars to the present, yet the past is not presented as
a passive or inglorious history.
Some poems portraying the African heritage stress the survival of
atavistic impulses in Afro-Americans and seem little more than Hughes's
attempt to take advantage of what Constance Rourke called the "cult" of
the Negro in the 1920's. 51 Still, if whites saw blacks as primitives, and if,
with some justification, they saw many of Hughes's poems as exotic
proof, Hughes himself, by 1940, could deny that he had ever intended
to act the primitive:

. . .I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive surging

through me, and so I could not live and write as though
I did. I was only an American Negro-who had loved the
surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa--but I was not
Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City and Broadway
and Harlem. 52

Nonetheless, the following poems do portray atavistic survivals

of Africa. "African Dance" (WB, p. 105), for example, in which the dance
of the "night-veiled girl" "stirs your blood," overtly declares the survival
of atavistic impulses. A more definite assertion of the continuity exist-
ing between the African past and the American experience appears in
"Afro-American Fragment" (SP, p. 3). The yearning for that dimly re-
membered land is obscured by the long years of separation and by a
"strange un-Negro tongue," yet unaccountable impulses survive:

There comes this song

I do not understand,
This song of atavistic land,
Of bitter yearnings lost.

The poem both asserts and denies. Something survives but it is not under-
stood. It is almost the precise statement Countee Cullen makes in "Heri-
tage"; but Hughes's poem lacks the resolution Cullen declared: i.e., his
determination to be a Christian regardless of what influences worked in
him. "Harlem Night Club" (WB, p. 32) and "Nude Young Dancer"
(WB, p. 33) both arouse, through jazz and dancing, instincts or memories
associated with life in Africa. In both poems, though, Hughes's vision of
primitive life is more pastoral than realistic. Even the mildly erotic
associations in "To Midnight Nan at Leroy's" (WB, p. 30), in which the
girl's "strut and wiggle" arouse in the narrator memories of Africa, do
not suggest authentic primitive life.
Perhaps a truly important echo of McKay and Cullen in Hughes's
poems portraying the African experience is the implicit statement that
30

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there was a place where Afro-Americans had known great happiness.
Their history, as Hughes seems to say, had not been entirely one of
slavery, alienation, and exploitation. As "Negro Servant" (OWT, p. 70)
expresses it, to escape from a humiliating social role, menial tasks, and the
oppressiveness of white authority, however briefly, is metaphorically
comparable to regaining freedom and the sense of having returned to
African delights.
As the poems above illustrate, Hughes believed African influences
survived in Afro-Americans and in their music, and he believed that
knowledge of Africa would contribute to the black man's self-awareness
and could provide him with more positive responses to his racial and
cultural heritage. Yet, as Hughes says himself, "I was only an American
Negro-who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa--
but I was not Africa." The African heritage was important to him and to
his race, but it was not the absolute determining influence on them.
Africa, for good and ill, was only one aspect of an ancient and complex
history.
Poems portraying the Southern heritage, like those on the African,
often stress the pervasiveness and importance of music in Afro-American
lives during and after slavery. In "Aunt Sue's Stories" (WB, p. 57), a
child rejoices at the "real stories" about slavery he hears from an aunt
who reveals to him the role song played in enabling his forebearers to
triumph despite oppression. "Spirituals" (FW, pp. 1 13-1 14) credits
this musical form with preserving religious values, the determination to
survive during slavery, and adds that spirituals themselves are the foun-
dation of a folk tradition still of great value. "Juice Joint: Northern City"
(OWT, pp. 67-69) and "Barrel House: Industrial City" both portray the
spiritual and emotional support that can be drawn from memories and
imaginative recapturings, aroused by music, of "lazy far-off drowsy
Southern days," the "sunny joys" of "good black feet. . .dancing on
bare floors."
A significant result which Hughes felt derived from the race's
ancient and complex history is brought out in several poems. The much-
anthologized "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (WB, p. 51) implies that its
long history has given the race a special knowledge or insight, something
timeless and profound: "My soul has grown deep like the river." "Being
Old," published in 1927, just one year after The Weary Blues, repeats the
idea that Afro-Americans possess intuitions derived from their heritage
which enable them to understand the ultimate futility of materialistic
goals. 53
Nearly twenty-five years later, Hughes wrote in "Prelude to Our
Age: A Negro History Poem" of their spiritual and intellectual con-
tributions. 54. Members of the race are celebrated for their share in advancing!
science, art and freedom , although they "were not free and could not
write a word." Inserting among his own lines verses from several spirituals,
31

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"Oh, Freedom," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Go Down, Moses,"
"My Lord, What a Morning," Hughes declares that the denial of skills
and formal education probably prevented American blacks from producing
a Dumas or Pushkin, but they did not prevent the creation of songs which
preserved their highest ideals and aspirations. So America as a whole was
thereby able to move closer to its ideals because these distinctively Amer-
ican musical forms are as valuable to the national culture as literature.
Written one year after "Prelude to Our Agę," Hughes's "A Ballad
of Negro History," was republished in 1967 as a tribute to the recently
deceased poet. 55 The "Ballad," a chronological survey of the African's and
the Afro-American's historical contributions, is a heavily detailed,
enthusiastic, if prosaic work. The main idea is that "on each page of
history" a substantial part has been played by black men, from medieval
Europe to the present, on all continents and in many cultures. In the
catalogue of heroes, which includes W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon
Johnson, Countee Cullen, Ralph Bunche and many others, "Josephine"
(almost certainly this is Josephine Baker) is mentioned prominently. She

. . .came home from France

To claim an equal chance
Through song and dance.

Other contributors to black music. Handy, who "wrote the bluesy"

"Williams and Walker (who) sang," receive praise, too, But Hughes follows
the tribute to these men with the following lines:

Still on Southern trees today

Dark bodies hang.

The poet's intention in juxtaposing the image of lynching victims against

a catalogue of those who contributed to the race's and America's great-
ness is obvious. Similarly, the "Ballad of the Seven Songs" is a tribute to
the songs and men who sustained their spirit and served in freedom's
cause during slavery. 56 Lincoln, John Brown, John Greenleaf Whittier,
William Lloyd Garrison, James Russell Lowell and some other white men
are included in the ranks of those who played important roles in gaining
freedom. Along with many of the same spirituals quoted in part in "Pre-
lude to Our Age," Hughes has added lines from "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic," which is in keeping with the more militant tone of the "Ballad
of the Seven Songs."
That music not only preserved the racial heritage and celebrated
advances toward freedom, equality, and human dignity but also played
an important part in guiding and advancing the political-social battles
to win freedom "all over again every generation," are attitudes prominent
in Hughes's overt protest poems, of which, Hughes wrote a great many;
32

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and at least one critic places him in the same tradition of protest as
Richard Wright, the "line of bitter, revolutionary social-protest poets."57
Another writer perhaps is more accurate; he agrees that Hughes was very
much in the protest tradition, but that he, along with Melvin B. Toison,
Robert E. Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks, survived the transition in
the 1950's away from the overt forms of protest in the thirties and
forties. 58 Among others who have written about Hughes's poetry and
prose, Emanuel, Dickinson, and Davis provide irrefutable evidence of the
dominant place of protest in his work and thus support Hughes's own
belief that the exploitation of blacks, especially the economic exploitation,
was his most constant concern. 59 |y|y own sampling of Hughes's protest
poems in this section, therefore, is not intended to repeat the conclusions
already amply supported by other studies; rather, my intention is to
demonstrate that Hughes often portrayed the association between black
music and political protest in order to stress that protest in various forms
has always been at least one aspect of the traditional music.
A brief preliminary comment on Hughes's political attitudes will,
it is hoped, explain certain questions which will come to any reader of
some of the poems discussed below. His political views were more a mat-
ter of shifting emphases than of an evolution or change in ideologies.
He avoided party affiliations throughout his life, although it can be said
that he consistently inclined to the left. In the 1930's he associated with
radical groups and individuals, sympathized with communists and
socialists, and shared their desire for economic and social reform in
America; but he apparently never joined the Communist Party. 50
"Kids Who Die," written in the 1930's, images the sacrifice of the
Party's agents and organizers as the prelude to the coming peace and
harmony among men. 51 Song, in "Kids Who Die," is a symbol of the true
unity and brotherhood which will be achieved when "black hands and
white hands" join. "Easy Boogie" (MDD, p. 12) is an attempt to convey
the literal similarity between musical rhythm and the synchronized move-
ments of marching men. The concluding metaphor urges the advantages
of unity:

Down in the bass

That steady beat
Walking walking walking
Like marching feet.

"Slivers" (MDD, p. 67), among many other poems, goes further than
"Easy Boogie" in asserting that a "tune" can be the vehicle of violent
revolutionary intention:

33

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 A cheap little tune
To cheap little rhymes
Can cut a man's
Throat sometimes.

Since this poem is published in Montage of a Dream Deferred,

a poem-Hughes calls the entire book one poem-dealing to a considerable
extent with wrongs blacks suffer, the implication of "slivers" is that
injustice and deprivation could well drive some individuals to violent
behavior. Moreover, "Mississippi (Words for a Plastic Sax)" details some
of the social implications of "Slivers," and jazz in this poem is depict-
ed as an inflammatory prod which can be used to goad and infuriate
people suffering unjustly but who have hitherto been cowed and passive.62
Jazz, it is asserted, can turn "smoldering shadows" into "fire." In
"Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963)" {PL, pp. 46-47), "song"
itself becomes a metaphor for violence:

Four little girls

Might be awakened someday soon
By songs upon the breeze
As yet unfelt among magnolia trees.

Also, a poem from the same collection, "The Backlash Blues" (pp. 8-9),
takes as its subject the worldwide rising of colored peoples and their
determination not to be segregated and unequal again, and not to allow
white reactionaries to suppress them again.
In conclusion, it should be evident that Hughes took black music as
a model jecause he believed that the music appealed to blacks almost
universally-perhaps to all men-and that it served an essentially positive
role, both of which he desired for his own poems, whether his subject
was the music itself, the black middle class, whites, cabaret life, love,
religion, Africa, the American South, black history, or social protest.

NOTES

1 Verna Arvey, "Langston Hughes-Crusader/' Opportunity, XVII I (1940

? American Negro Poetry, xvi.

3 The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, 1965), p. 75.

4 Langston Hughes (New York, 1967), pp. 173-174.

Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes , 1920-1960 (New York 1967),

p. 117.
34

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 ^See Emanuel, Langston Hughes , esp. p. 138, for some discussion of Hughes's
attempts to achieve "a poetic transcription of the blues form." In "The Literary
Experiments of Langston Hughes," CLA Journal, XI, 4 (June 1968), 335-344, the
same author lists a number of Hughes's experiments in various genres. Saunders
Redding briefly comments on Hughes's experiments in forms derived from the blues
and shouts-- To Make a Poet Black (Chapel Hill, 1939), pp. 115-116. Babette Deutsch
credits Hughes with having adapted the blu«»« "and injected its syncopated
effect and the attendant mood into several pieces '--Poe try in Our Time (New
York, 1963), p. 399.

7"Songs Called the Blues," Phyton, II (Second Quarter 1941), p. 145. For
discussions of Hughes's broad appeal among Afro-Americans see Richard Bardolph,
The Negro Vanguard (New York, 1959), p. 203; Edward Margolies, Native Sons
(New York, 1968), p. 37.

8 American Authors Today, eds. Whit Burnett and Charles E. Slatkin (New
York, 1947), p. 165.

9(New York, 1945), p. 209. The later autobiography is / Wonder As / Wander

(New York, 1956).

^That Hughes was essentially consistent in his optimism as well as in his

reliance on black music is noted by many writers: Emanuel, Langston Hughes,
p. 34; Dudley Randall, "Black Poetry," in Black Expression, ed. Addison Gayle
(New York, 1969), p. 1 14; Arna Bontemps, "Langston Hughes: He Spoke of Rivers,"
Freedomways, VIII (Spring 1968), 140-143; and many others.

1 1See Emanuel, Langston Hughes, p. 173. Of the twenty poems he ranks as

the best of hundreds by Hughes, thirteen are clearly indebted to traditional black
music.

^Constance Rourke is probably most responsible for tracing the origins of

a black tradition in literature to the earliest forms of black music-77?e Roots of
American Culture and Other Essays (New York, 1942). But against the grain of
this widely accepted explanation of the origins of a poetic tradition for black liter-
ature, Arna Bontemps has speculated that the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, which
reveals no awareness of black folk tradition, suggests that music has not been the
only source of the black poetic traditio n-American Negro Poetry, xviii.

1^W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn., 1967), pp.
182, 186, 187, 189.

^Quoted in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs
(Chapel Hill, 1925), p. 17.

15"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Nation, CXXII (June 23,
1926), 693.

^"Gospel Singing: When the Spirit Really Moves," New York Herald-Tribune
Magazine (October 27, 1963), p. 13.

1777?e Big Sea, p. 263.

35

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 I^For this study I have drawn on all his major collections of poetry as well
as on shorter collections and poems published in magazines and newspapers. Page
references appearing in the text are only to the major collections; for all the others
I have supplied footnotes. The collections and the initials I shall use in page refer-
ences are as follows; WB=The Weary Blues (New York, 1926);
FCJmFine Clothes to the Jew (New York, 1927); TDK=The Dream Keeper (New
York [1932] 1949); SH=Shakespeare in Harlem (New York, 1942); FW=Fields of
Wonder (New York, 1947); OWT=One-Way Ticket (New York, 1949); MDD=Mon-
tage of a Dream Deferred (New York, 1951), SP=Se/ec ted Poems (New York, [1959]
1968); A YM-Ask Your Mama (New York, 1961 ); PL=The Panther and the Lash
(New York, 1967).

™The Big Sea, p. 209.

20"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," p. 693.

21 "My Adventures as a Social Poet," Phyton, VIII (1947), 206.

22 Journal of Negro Life (August 1932), p. 249.

23 Opportunity (May 1926), p. 167.

24 Opportunity (June 1930), p. 182.

^B/ues People, p. 176.

26 Langston Hughes Reader (New York, 1958), p. 130.

27Quoted in Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, p. 51 . In the same

work, Bone states that the search for a distinctive tradition made up the essence of
the Harlem Renaissance.

28 igegro Mother (New York, 1931 ), pp. 8-1 1 .

29 Poetry (September 1943), pp. 313-314.

30"jhe White Negro," in The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men,
eds. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (New York, 1959), p. 375.

"A Negro to His Critics," New York Herald Tribune (March 6, 1932),
P. 1.

32"Richard Wright's Blues," Shadow and Act (New York, 1966), p. 90.

33 Ask Your Mama (1961) is almost a catalogue of the great names in music-
as well as of people in many other activities. And see Charles Keil, Urban Blues
(Chicago, 1969), a study of contemporary black music in which the author argues
that musicians and singers are "culture heroes," preeminent among those who have
preserved and made available to others the most positive elements in the black
experience.

34"Hurt," Harlem (November 1928), p. 38.

35" Langston Hughes: Cool Poet," CLA Journal, XI, 4 (June 1968), 294-295.
36

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 ^B/ues People (New York, 1963), pp. 212-213.

37 Jim Crow (I943), p. 19.

3&Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, ed. Thomas Yoseloff (New York,

1944), pp. 48-49.

39cF. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 266: "In the struggle against Negro
freedom, motion pictures have been one of the strongest instruments for justifying
some white Americans' anti-Negro attitudes and practices."

40jhe means for the formalizing or ritualizing of grief apparently affected

Hughes strongly even when they did not involve music. His response to an Irish
funeral, for example, is close to his view6 of the function of black music-and his own
poetry. In "Irish Wake" {TDK, p. 25), he describes how the intense expression of
grief left the mourners free, on the following morning, to greet the dawn with smiles.
Their sadness has vanished, and they can appreciate natural pleasures again: "the sun
rose making / All the dooryard bright and clear."

New Republic (April 14, 1926), p. 223.

^^Against these settings dominated by music and love, it is interesting to con-

trast this impressionistic account Hughes wrote in 1932 after a visit to Kilby Prison,
Alabama, where he spoke to the Scottsboro Boys:
In the death house, I heard no song at all.
Only a silence more ominous than song.
All of Brown America locked up there.
And no song.
"Brown America in Jail: Kilby,"Opporft7/7/řy, X (June 1932), 174.

^Emanuel, Langston Hughes, p. 90, and Davis, "Langston Hughes: Cool

Poet," p. 293.

44Emanuel quotes Hughes's description of how he'd been influenced by the

"rhythms of the Negro church. . .spirituals. . .and old time sermons. . .And when I
began to write poetry, that influence came through' "-Langston Hughes, p. 90.

45 Langston Hughes Reader, pp. 155-156.

457776 Big Sea, p. 1 1 .

47ßenjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America (New York, 1966)
p. 263. For detailed listings of Hughes's extensive historical works in prose, poetry,
and fiction, see Dickinson, A Bio-Bibliography, and Emanuel, Langston Hughes.

48 Palms, IV, 1 (October 1926), 24.

49//V77 Crow (1943), p. 26.

50 Liberator (August 1964), p. 4.

51 "The onset of plays and novels about the Negro in the last eight or ten
years, the vogue of the spirituals, the rise of jazz, and the slender outcroppings of a
ļiterature by Negro writers has produced a familiar response-a cult"--77?e Roots of
American Culture, p. 262. 37

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 ^The Big Sea, p. 325. In a poem entitled "Poet to Patron," American Mercury
(June 1939), p. 147, Hughes also declared his refusal to be anything except what
he was.

53 Crisis (October 1927), p. 265.

5 ^Crisis (February 1951 ), pp. 87-90.

55 Negro History Bulletin (February 1952), p. 92.

55 Common Ground, IX, 2 (Winter 1959), 21-27.

57Margolies, Native Sons, pp. 43-44.

5ÖDickinson, A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, p. 111.

59Hughes, "My Adventures asa Social Poet," pp. 205-212; and see Emanuel,
Langston Hughes; Dickinson, A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes; Davis, "The
Harlem of Langston Hughes' Poetry," Phylon, XIII (Winter 1952), 276-283.

50Edward Margolies, Native Sons, p. 36, states that Hughes "joined the
Communist Party and headed a Party unit of Negro authors" in the early 1930's.
Hughes, however, though often sympathetic to leftist causes, especially the espousal
of equality and freedom for Afro-Americans, denied he was ever a Party member.
See "My Adventures as a Social Poet," pp. 205-212.

51a New Song, pp. 18-19.

52/Veiv Republic (August 21 , 1961 ), p. 23.

38

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