Terrance McKnight and Franklin Bruno on music in the life of Langston Hughes

As part of last month’s celebration of Langston Hughes’s 110th birthday, WQXR-FM broadcast an hourlong radio documentary, I, Too, Sing America: Music in the Life of Langston Hughes, produced and narrated by Terrance McKnight. While best known as the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes once said that he believed that “words with music could reach more people than words on paper.” The program chronicles the wide variety of music that influenced Hughes and the even wider range of his musical collaborations, which included pop songs, Broadway showstoppers, gospel spirituals, opera arias, and jazz poetry with musical accompaniment.

Hughes’s obsession with music started early. In his semi-autobiographical novel Not Without Laughter Hughes offers a virtuoso riff on what ten-year-old Sandy witnesses when his babysitting aunt sneaks him into a Kansas dance club in 1912:

“Whaw! Whaw! Whaw!” mocked the cornet—but the steady tomtom of the drums was no longer laughter now, no longer even pleasant: the drum beats had become sharp with surly sound, like heavy waves that beat angrily on a granite rock. And under the dissolute spell of its own rhythm the music had got quite beyond itself. The four black men in Benbow’s wandering band were exploring depths to which mere sound had no business to go. Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checker-board.

In his essay “When the Negro Was in Vogue,” looking back at his nineteen-year-old self, freshly arrived in New York City, Hughes describes his reaction to seeing the musical Shuffle Along (1921), with music by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle and a yet-to-be-discoverered Josephine Baker in the chorus:

Shuffle Along was a honey of a show. Swift, bright, funny, rollicking, and gay, with a dozen danceable, singable tunes. . . To see Shuffle Along was the main reason I wanted to go to Columbia. When I saw it, I was thrilled and delighted. From then on I was in the gallery of the Cort Theatre every time I got the chance. . . . I remember Shuffle Along best of all. It gave the proper push—a pre-Charleston kick—to the Negro vogue of the 20’s, that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing.

In the radio program, McKendrick relates how Hughes yearned to bring black history and black folklore to the opera stage. When the Gershwins beat him to it with Porgy and Bess in 1935, Hughes’s responded with the poem “Note on Commercial Theatre”:

You’ve taken my blues and gone—
You sing ’em on Broadway
And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl,
And you mixed ’em up with symphonies
And you fixed ’em
So they don’t sound like me.
Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

But later in the poem, he predicts:

. . . someday somebody’ll
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!

Hughes’s breakthrough came in 1945 when Elmer Rice invited him to join in a collaboration with Kurt Weill on Street Scene. The result was what is still Hughes’s most frequently performed song “Lonely House.” In 1949 Hughes realized his dream when he collaborated with William Grant Still on Troubled Island, an opera about the Haitian revolution, for New York City Opera. The first opera composed by an African American to be produced by a major opera company, Troubled Island received twenty-two curtain calls on opening night but negative reviews caused it to shut down after only three performances and it has never been revived.

On the Poetry Foundation's website, Franklin Bruno offers an appreciation of the musical comedy Simply Heavenly, Hughes’s 1957 collaboration with Dave Martin, based on the long-running character Jesse B. Simple in Hughes weekly column for the Chicago newspaper The Defender. Comparing it favorably to the recent hit musical In the Heights, Bruno finds many of the numbers in the show “magnificent”:

They added escape, affirmation, lament, complaint, and a challenge to the reduction of rhythm to clock-time. The show’s best songs are distinctive, witty, and touching, combining Martin’s idiomatic sense of melody and phrasing with Hughes’s own predilection for “composed” urban blues over Southern “country” styles.”

Bruno cites the blues number “Broken Strings” sung by Brownie McGhee as “the score’s undiscovered gem” and McKnight’s program includes McGhee’s version. Despite a few short-lived revivals since, Simply Heavenly never became popular and Hughes abandoned musicals in favor of the tremendously successful genre of gospel plays he launched with Black Nativity in 1961.

Also of interest:

• Listen to Lotte Lenya sing “Lonely House” from Street Scene on Spotify
• Listen to Langston Hughes read “Same in Blues / Comment on Curb” as part of his 1958 collaboration with Charles Mingus and the Horace Parlan Quintet 
• In 1950 Hughes climbed the pop charts with his lyrics for Nellie Lutcher’s “Baby, What’s Your Alibi?” (Spotify)
• The Langston Hughes Project offers a multimedia performance of Hughes’s poem "Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz" 

Related LOA works: Harlem Renaissance Novels (boxed set; includes Not Without Laughter); Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes “When the Negro Was in Vogue”); The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (includes one of Hughes’s Simple pieces, “Simple Prays a Prayer”)

Rafia Zafar on Harlem Renaissance novelists Arna Bontemps, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen

In September The Library of America celebrates one of the most remarkable eras in American literature with its publication of a two-volume collection of nine novels of the Harlem Renaissance. As editor Rafia Zafar notes in her exclusive LOA interview (PDF) about Harlem Renaissance Novels:

In literary terms what happened during this period was epochal. David Levering Lewis has pointed out that in the nineteen years after Charles W. Chesnutt published The Colonel’s Dream in 1905, only five African Americans published significant books. By contrast, between 1922 and 1937 the sixteen best-known black authors of the Harlem Renaissance published more than fifty books.

Zafar goes on to describe the challenging task of selecting what to include:

LOA: While best known for his poetry, Langston Hughes re-created the experience of growing up black in Kansas in his semi-autobiographical character-rich novel Not Without Laughter (1930). Does Hughes get at something through his Midwestern lens that the Harlem settings of the other novels are not able to? 

Zafar: Yes, one of the reasons I included Not Without Laughter was to break down ideas about the “Harlem Renaissance” only being about New York City—or for that matter, about rural folks in the deep south, à la Jean Toomer. Although there is another American classic that begins with a tornado in Kansas, there are few other similarities between this one and the L. Frank Baum novel (how can I resist pointing out this congruence?). Hughes’s boy’s-eye view of growing up poor but aspirational I find simply beautiful—just as some of his reflections on the bedrock nature of racism hit me equally hard. Few have painted as astutely the roller coaster of emotions that illuminate the life of a poor black child. 

LOA: You chose to include Nella Larsen’s questing identity novel Quicksand instead of Passing, her intriguing novel of racial and sexual ambiguity. It had to be a difficult choice. Why Quicksand? Was it because you favor Jessie Redmon Fauset’s treatment of “passing” in Plum Bun? 

Zafar: It was difficult! With Plum Bun, one has the passing theme, as of course does Larsen’s second novel. Yet I chose to include Plum Bun not only for its handling of those who cross the color line but also for its depiction of a wellbrought-up black woman’s decision to live la vie bohème. For Fauset’s Angela Murray to have sex outside of marriage—and not be punished for that decision—challenges ideas about a tightly laced brown bourgeoisie. Fauset’s casting her character’s narrative as a modern fairy tale, as Deborah McDowell has shown in “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory, gives us an interesting take on a familiar genre. 

As for my choice of Larsen’s first novel rather than her second—Quicksand adds to the LOA set a psychologically astute treatment of the (supposedly) tragic mulatto. In the nineteenth century, characters “caught” between the white world and the black generally ended up dead; Quicksand’s Helga Crane does not die by her own hand, but her inability to choose one category over another, and her imprisonment within the heterosexual female gender role, lead to a different kind of troubled ending. 

In other words, I asked myself how could I get the most extensive representation of writing styles, themes, generic experiments, and so on within a limited number of pages? I would have loved to put in every Renaissance novel published! 

*             *             *

LOA: Black Thunder (1936) by Arna Bontemps is the only novel in the collection that recreates a historical event, in this case Gabriel Prosser’s slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia in 1800. Charles W. Chesnutt attempted a similar reclamation of a historical event in The Marrow of Tradition (1901). How does Bontemps’s effort compare with Chesnutt’s?

Zafar: What’s particularly notable about Black Thunder is that Bontemps reaches back so far—Chesnutt’s novel imaginatively recreated a relatively recent event, the horrific anti-black Wilmington, North Carolina riots of 1898 (Marrow was published three years later). Bontemps reconstructs a historical figure, Gabriel Prosser, who already had passed emphatically into folk tradition. So in some ways it’s fair to say that the two authors, although crafting historical fiction, had different contemporary agendas. Bontemps, who would later become Fisk University’s archivist, understood that heroic black figures like Prosser need sympathetic authors to script their nearly mythic lives; black narratives of progress become potent when historical actors stand at the center.

Read the entire interview (PDF)

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Arna Bontemps, poet, novelist, anthologist of the Harlem Renaissance
• Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition reimagines the Wilmington, North Carolina coup d’etat
• Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928

Related LOA works: Harlem Renaissance Novels (boxed set); 20th-Century African American Authors Set (6 volumes plus a free book); Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays

Arna Bontemps, poet, novelist, anthologist of the Harlem Renaissance

Arna Bontemps would have turned 108 today. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of a Creole bricklayer and teacher, Bontemps grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Upon graduating from Pacific Union College, Bontemps accepted a teaching position at the Seventh Day Adventist Harlem Academy and arrived in New York just as The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, published his first poem “Hope” in its August 1924 issue.

While teaching in Harlem, Bontemps became acquainted with many Harlem Renaissance figures: Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and especially Langston Hughes. Bontemps and Hughes would collaborate on a poetry collection, a play, two books for children, and two benchmark anthologies, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). As Bontemps would later write: “there was a happening in black America in those days . . . suddenly stars began to fall on a part of Manhattan that white residents had begun abandoning.”

Bontemps’s first novel, God Sends Sunday, about a black jockey in the 1890s, was published in 1931. Although Du Bois criticized it for depicting the seamy side of black life, others hailed it for its unique depiction of black people’s interest in the sporting life and its use of Creole language. That same year, Bontemps left New York for a teaching position at the conservative Oakwood Academy in Alabama. “The golden days were gone,” he later wrote, “or was it just the bloom of youth that had been lost?” Unfortunately, a confrontation with the Oakwood administration led to Bontemps moving his wife and five children back to his father’s small home in California. Reportedly written on top of a sewing machine, his second novel, Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936), about Gabriel Prosser's aborted slave rebellion, is often acclaimed as his masterpiece.

When his third novel Drums at Dusk (1939), about a slave revolt in Santo Domingo, received a mixed response, Bontemps stopped writing fiction. He instead sought a degree in library science from the University of Chicago. During his subsequent twenty-two-year career at Fisk University, Bontemps substantially expanded its holdings, acquiring the papers of such prominent African Americans of letters as Du Bois, Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, W. C. Handy, and Jean Toomer, among others.

In 1946 Bontemps collaborated with Countee Cullen to turn God Sends Sunday into the musical St. Louis Woman with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Johnny Mercer and featuring the song “Come Rain or Come Shine.” The show ran 113 performances and is noteworthy for the Broadway debut of Pearl Bailey as Butterfly.

Author or editor of more than fifty books, Bontemps is considered one of the foremost historians, chroniclers, and preservers of black cultural heritage. His works include a stream of biographies, histories, and fiction for children, including the 1949 Newbery Honor Book Story of the Negro. Among the other significant anthologies Bontemps edited are The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), a collected of essays of notable figures of the period and including Bontemps’s own reflections, and Personals (1963), a collection of his own poetry and his thoughts on Harlem Renaissance writers.

Of related interest:

• The CenLamar blog on Life in Louisiana recently posted an appreciation of the Arna Bontemps African American Museum.
• The Arna Wendell Bontemps Papers are housed at Syracuse University
• The We Too Were Children blog recently celebrated Popo and Fifino: Children of Haiti, one of the children’s books Bontemps and Hughes co-wrote.

Related LOA works: American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume two: E. E. Cummings to May Swenson (includes four poems by Bontemps); Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (includes an excerpt from God Sends Sunday)