Jazz and Blues Influences in Langston Hughes’ Poems

Introduction

On paper, I do not have much in common with Langston Hughes or the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ which brought to full bloom the interest in traditional African-American folklore in the 1920’s: I am not an African-American, I have never been in Harlem (barely two short trips to New York City), and I have not read or heard poetry in years.  Yet, when I came across Hughes’ poems and the ‘Harlem Renaissance’, I connected with it immediately. It is a part of an important period of in the United States and the melting pot concept of its culture.  I find the connection between African-American poetry and Jazz solid - both using figurative language and symbolism, high inspiration, value to the line of thought, and repetitions.  Townsen (2000) claims that jazz and poetry are also linked as minority arts’ forms, their non-standard attitudes, and their separation from commercial interests.  Hughes was fascinated with black music, tried his hand at writing lyrics, and even performed when music and poetry were presented together in the “Jazz-and-poetry” phenomenon of the late 1950s.  Hughes also wrote many poems with musical themes, e.g., Jazzonia, Jazz Band in Parisian Cabaret, Visitors to the Black Belt, etc.  In this paper, three poems with a strong connection to Jazz and Blues are analyzed: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Harlem, and Dream Boogie.  Jazz and Blues influences on these poems are discussed, including spiritual and classical Blues rhythm and the ‘bebop’ Jazzy style.

Introduction to Jazz

Jazz music has roots in both African and Western cultures.  When Jazz came into the world, around 100 years ago in New Orleans, it gave music some new additions.  It has been developed in a hundred years as much as it took classical music thousands of years to develop. Its greatest addition to the world of music is in the way the production of sound was considered an important self-expression element that outwits esthetic issues.  Jazz was created as a consolidation of African and Western cultures.  New Orleans, as a city with a mix of African and Western population, spread it around the nation (and later on, the world).  Jazz developed from the collision of cultures, containing the European organization, and the African art of improvisation.  The African origins of Jazz were mostly of unwritten music.  It included African field hollers and work songs of slaves in the cotton fields and work camps, a call-and-response structure of African traditions delivering messages with decreasing melodic lines, and spirituals songs from the Bible (‘Old Testament’) and the ‘New Testament’.  The written African origins include the Ragtime - composed melodies without improvisation, and the Blues, which is the most important foundation of Jazz.  Blues is a solo singing accompaniment by a string instrument expressing feelings of sadness and nostalgia with repeated harmonic sequence.  The Blues itself contains two scales, European and African, in a twelve’ or eight’ measure structure.  In the 1920s, Blues was recorded for commercial sale, becoming a big success and part of the fuel that got the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ swinging.

Ironically, Jazz actually started as a dance music, performed by New Orleans’ swinging Big Bands (Dixieland/Charleston style).  Soon, during the 1920s, the dance elements faded into the background and improvisation became the key element of the music. Music was starting to be composed of the sequence of the musical phrase and not the sound beats of the metronome.  Around the years 1928-9, a new style was invented – the Swing, played by large Big Bands with a constant riff (repetitions of short rhythm). As the genre evolved, beginning in the 1930s, the music split into a number of different styles, from the speedy, hard-hitting rhythms of Bebop (from the 1940s) and the laid-back, mellow harmonies of Cool Jazz to the jittery, atonal forays of Free Jazz (1960s) and the earthy grooves of Soul Jazz.

 Langston Hughes, The Harlem Renaissance, And Jazz

Poet and writer Langston Hughes, famous for his description of African American life in his work, was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902.  He came from the Kansas City area, the birthplace of Big Band Jazz.  Hughes's poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, written the summer after he graduated from high school opened him the way to a successful career.  He was a promoter of African-American culture in general and Jazz music in particular, and one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance (a.k.a. New Negro Movement), the flowering of African-American arts and literature in the Harlem district of New York City during the 1920s and 1930s.

Hughes used Jazz and Blues influences in his work starting in 1923, in his title The Weary Blues, in which the persona recalls hearing a Blues singer and a piano player.  He used the rhythms of black music and especially syncopation, a displacement of a stress in an unexpected place as played in Jazz music.  His earliest references to Jazz acknowledged the exotic nature of it which was customary in the presentation of Jazz in the 1920s (Townsend, 2000).

Hughes’ poems are often lyrical in the musical sense of the word - many of them could easily be set to a rhythmic beat. In earlier poems of his, such as The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1926, see the first poem analyzed), he used a call-and-response style of the field/spiritual origin of Jazz music.  In such music, the singer/preacher tells a story and the chorus answers in a specific refrain, an important trait in Blues format.  Tracy (1988), indicated that the Blues, a form of folk poetry, is the soul of Langston Hughes’s work.  The connection between Hughes and Blues was so strong, that as early as 1927 Hughes employed a Jazz pianist to play the Blues as an accompaniment to his poetry readings.  On his own account, Hughes is known for working on the composition of his Blues poems by singing them on his way to work.  Later, Hughes wrote about the novelty of the entrance of wealthy whites to the Jazz industry in times of segregation in New York City and applauded Jazz musicians.

By using the same subjects used in many Blues lyrics, Hughes portrayed nuances of black life.  He also used repetitions derived from the repetitions common in conventional Blues stanza.  In his essay titled The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (1926), he eloquently defended the honest representations of black culture and the use of jazz, dialect, and other influences that had become a trademark in the work of many Harlem Renaissance writers.  The second this paper analyzes, Harlem, is an example of a Classical Blues poem, addressing the deferred dream of the African Americans.  Langston Hughes’ poetry, like Jazz itself, has evolved throughout the years.  During the 1950s and 1960s, as the ‘bebop’ (also called ‘bop’) period in Jazz evolved, and Hughes wrote a few poems with bebop influences. Dream Boogie is one of these poems.

First Poem - Spiritual Blues – The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Hughes’ earliest poems contained the call-and-response style of spirituals and field music. Hughes himself wrote in his book Songs called the blues (1941): “The Blues and the spirituals are two great Negro gifts to American music” (Tracy, 43-4). In such gospel-spiritual music, the singer tells a story and the chorus answers in a specific refrain that repeats over and over the symbols and ideas.  The symbol of the river, for instance, is repeated six times in this poem:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of

 human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my house near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to

 New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the

 sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

Second Poem - Blues - Harlem (Dream Deferred)

One of Hughes’ most famous poems is Harlem (Dream Deferred). This poem also uses a Blues form of spiritual call-and-response.

Harlem (Dream Deferred)

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

  This poem, published in 1951, describes the dream of African Americans to be equal and unseparated.  It wishes the fantasy of equality to become a reality as a need for African Americans in particular and humanity in general.  The poem has a voice of rebellion within and a rumble that can be the rumble of a revolution or something starting to happen.  For me, it is like a rumble of a percussion instrument in a Jazz band, a continuous rumble that makes me feel uncomfortable with it. Something is starting to happen and we do not really know what; it can sag and die, yet can explode in a positive way.  This rumble, in my opinion, can be the fight for real freedom and human rights by African Americans – A dream that at that days was dry and slow, tolerant and polite yet dangerous and explosive.  We do not know why the dream is deferred or postponed, but we get the feeling that it is about to explode in a burst of energy, starting a revolution.  Hughes is able to bring out the frustration of the deferred dream – he writes about a dream deferred yet not a dream never to be realized.  He holds out hope no matter how much desperate is the African-American condition.

The images of this poem are “sensory, domestic, earthy, like Blues images. The stress is one deterioration – drying, rotting, festering, souring – on [the] loss of essential natural quality” (Kennedy, 2001, p. 1156).  The negative imagery and the unanswered Bluesy questions create a sense of despair and disappointment.  The “heavy” tone is in a call-and-response pattern encourage us, readers, to answer the “preacher’s” questions.  The dialect of everyday language and the repetitions make Harlem be connected even more to Blues.  Remembering that original Blues was performed with a solo singer accompaniment by a string instrument and expressed feelings of sadness and nostalgia can help us understand the images even better, leaving us with a shocking open question at the end of the poem - Or does it explode?

Third Poem - Bebop Jazz– Dream Boogie

Langston Hughes’ poetry, like music jazz itself, has evolved through the years. During the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘bebop’ period in Jazz evolved out of the ‘jam sessions’ of the Jazz musicians, impromptu concerts held in basements.  The asymmetry of rhythm and phrasing attracted Hughes, as Townsend stated: “Hughes responded with particular sympathy to Jazz of the bebop period, which he saw as having great political significance” (p.  127).  Hughes believed that “poems, like bebop style, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, and passages sometimes in the manner of the ‘jam session’, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks and distortions of the music of a community in transition” (Kennedy, 2001, p. 1154).

Hughes wrote Dream Boogie when he was on a train to visit his father in Mexico in 1920.  He used the river as an important symbol symbolizes slavery, life, loss of culture and death, travel, exploration, and discovery.  Suicide as a theme can be mentioned with a river in mind, too.  Through the images of water and pyramid, the verse suggests the win of human spirituality from early Egypt to modern times (Harris & Davis, 1987).  The slaves sold down the Mississippi river to slavery cities were transported through the river.  In this poem, which starts in a classical Blues format (AAB), Hughes keep returning to the theme of “like rives”, like a call-and-response gospel ecclesiastical religious music.

Dream Boogie

Good morning, daddy!

Ain't you heard

the boogie-woogie rumble

of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:

You'll hear their feet

Beating out and beating out a -

You think

It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:

Ain't you heard

something underneath

like a -

What did I say?

Sure,

I'm happy!

Take it away!

Hey pop!

Re-bop!

Mop!

Y-e-a-h!

In the Dream Boogie poem, Hughes attempts to capture the questionable rumbling in the rhythms of bebop and boogie-woogie.  Bebop was a radical new Jazz music that developed gradually in the early 1940s and exploded in 1950s, becoming the spinal column of Jazz in New York City.  One of the main traits of the bebop was its shortness and condensation, an important element in poetry too.  The bebop style used the percussion player to play musical accents ‘off the beat’, antagonized to the accents of the ‘front line’ containing the saxophone and trumpet.  Boogie-woogie, according to Tracey (1988) is “a form of African-American music, normally performed on the piano, that emerged a recognizable genre in the 1920’s…It has a medium-to-fast tempo that builds an explosive drive and swing appropriate to the dance step…To “boogie” is also to raise a ruckus or act widely or uninhibitedly” (p. 226).  The combination of bebop and boogie-woogie creates a high tempo style.

The poem glorifies the fullness and richness of the upbeat black culture. It contains a dialogue between two, probably a child and a father.  The auditory image here is very important, and auditory imagery is mentioned three times.  The structure is of twelve-line and the questions change the rhythm, making it out of beat and violating the rhythm pattern.  By using the phrases “Hey, pop! Re-bop! Mop!” and “Daddy”, Hughes adds African-American dialect, a slang-like talk. Its allusions to Jazz music and ‘off the beat’ rhythm rules this poem’s rhythmic structure as if you could dance to its rhythm like a boogie-woogie dance.  The short-clip words sound like dancing steps and can be associated with the rushing-running rhythm of life in New York City.  The rumbling can be a symbol of the anxiety of the African Americans (as in Harlem).

Summary

The trap of Hughes was his need to be a poet like all poets and yet be categorized as a part of the “Black Poetry” jargon is something Hughes faced with a sense of duty and responsibility.  He took pride in the black musical and cultural traditions. Taking Jazz rhythms, structure, repetitions, and subjects of matter, he was able to write lines that captured the cadences of common American speech and music. He took it directly to the people, addressing an audience for which music was a central experience.

Hughes felt that “black music put people in touch with themselves and the universe, that it united the internal and external” (Tracy, 1988, p. 116).  In recent decades, Rap and R&B music have probably become what Jazz was in the first half of the 20th century – a voice for people in general and African-Americans, in particular, to express their art in an inspiring “informal” way.  Hughes has created a fusion of the rhythms of Blues and Jazz with traditional poetry, trying to market the music and poems together.  He did it with love for music, a love that enriched his literary world with musical elements.  Art is when we can catch a moment in space and freeze it for future generations to see, hear, and read.  Hughes’ art has made it possible for me, to reconnect with those themes and issues and enabled me to take part in Hughes’ musical world.  Hughes died in 1967, in Harlem, New York city. His legacy lives on.

References

Harris, T., & Davis, T. (1987). Afro-American writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. Chapel Hill, NC: The Gale Group.

Hughes, L. (1926). The negro artist and the racial mountain. The Nation.

Jackson, A. P. (2001). Langston Hughes - The poet laureate of Harlem. Queens, NY: Queens Borough Public Library.

Kennedy X. J, & Gioia, D. (2001). Literature – An introduction to fiction, poetry, and drama. (8th Edition). New York, NY: Longman-Addison 

Townsend, P. (2000). Jazz in American culture. Jackson, MA: University Press of Mississippi.

Tracy, S. C. (1988). Langston Hughes and the blues. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press