May 22 marks the 1967 passing of one of America’s foremost literary giants: James Mercer Langston Hughes. Born in February 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes would publish his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in the June 1921 issue of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was just 20 years old at the time. Hughes would go on to become a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing not only poetry, but essays, plays, novels, and short stories, as well.
For today’s Black Music Sunday, let’s explore Hughes’ intimate relationship with jazz and Black music. He was the progenitor of what came to be known as “jazz poetry.” With that in mind, join me in celebrating not only Langston Hughes, but the entire genre of jazz poetry he spearheaded.
Poets.com offers this short definition of jazz poetry:
Jazz poetry is a literary genre defined as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music—that is, poetry in which the poet responds to and writes about jazz. Jazz poetry, like the music itself, encompasses a variety of forms, rhythms, and sounds. Beginning with the birth of blues and jazz at the start of the twentieth century, jazz poetry is can be seen as a thread that runs through the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement, and the Black Arts Movement—and it is still vibrant today. From early blues to free jazz to experimental music, jazz poets use their appreciation for the music as poetic inspiration.
Jazz artists make appearances in jazz poems as well: Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Bessie Smith, and Lester Young are just some of the muses for jazz poetry.
And as Rebecca Gross wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts blog in 2014:
Langston Hughes was never far from jazz. He listened to it at nightclubs, collaborated with musicians from Monk to Mingus, often held readings accompanied by jazz combos, and even wrote a children’s book called The First Book of Jazz. For Hughes, jazz was a way of life.
He was, of course, not an ordinary jazz fan simply enamored with the sound. A vocal proponent of racial consciousness, the poet considered jazz and the blues to be uniquely African-American art forms, both of which spurned the desire for assimilation and acceptance by white culture, and instead rejoiced in black heritage and creativity. Rather than wish away daily hardship, the blues instead elevated the troubles of the workaday African American into art. As he wrote in his 1926 story “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:
“But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”
Scroll through the slideshow below for a taste of Hughes’ children’s book, The First Book of Jazz.
For those unfamiliar with Hughes, here’s a brief biographical documentary from Biography, who notes that “Hughes was the leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, whose poetry showcased the dignity and beauty in ordinary black life. The hours he spent in Harlem clubs affected his work, making him one of the innovators of Jazz Poetry.”
The 4sp Film Channel on YouTube makes poetry videos that blend old film footage with poetry readings. They crafted a perfect setting for Hughes “The Weary Blues,” recited by Allen Dwight Callahan.
Here’s the poem:
“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 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 a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got 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.
Hughes also recorded an album of his poetry with a jazz accompaniment in 1958; also named The Weary Blues, it was composed and arranged by Leonard Feather and Charlie Mingus. Mingus was featured in a 2020 installment of Black Music Sunday.
Here’s that 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.
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 —
But 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!
Yes, it'll be me.
Writing for JSTOR in 2021, Ashawnta Jackson’s “What Is Jazz Poetry?” introduces Charlie Mingus’ “Scenes in the City.”
Jazz poetry can be poetry that is strictly about jazz, or it can take its structure from the rhythms of the music. Because the definition of the form is so varied, explains musician and musicologist Hao Huang, poets as different as “Jack Kerouac and Maya Angelou have tried their hand at writing jazz poetry, often experimenting with jazz music backgrounds to their own poetry readings, with varying degrees of literary integrity and success.”
It’s this mingling of forms that gave us pieces like Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City” (1959), a nearly twelve-minute piece where Mingus’s band backs narrator Melvin Stuart as he recites a Lonnie Elders and Langston Hughes poem about life and music and modern city life.
I love these lines:
I guess I’m the only man in the world who wakes up too Jazz music in the morning
I guess, i cant say exactly why
I guess I find it solemn…
Like a hymn
Ya know I had to prove that to my mother when I was living back home
I’d wake up to them sounds
Mom didnt dig, she just didnt go for it
Bird, Miles, Max… she just couldnt see it
Morning, afternoon, night or anytime
That is until I played her some monk one night,late
Round Midnight
I played her some monk
Thelonious that is
Now Mom spends many of her nights in tunisia
Enjoy the over 11-minute journey below.
When jazz poet Jayne Cortez passed away in December 2012. Margaret Busby penned her obituary for The Guardian.
Born Sallie Jayne Richardson in Arizona, she moved at the age of seven to Los Angeles, where she grew up in the Watts district, enthralled by her parents' jazz and blues record collection. She played bass at school. In 1954, she married the avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman (a track on his first album is entitled Jayne). Their son, Denardo, was born in 1956; as a child he began drumming with his father and he later collaborated with both parents in their separate careers. They divorced in 1964.
Assuming her maternal grandmother's maiden name, Cortez began writing down thoughts that turned into poems. She also became involved in the civil rights movement, working in Mississippi and raising money for the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee. "I wrote more political kinds of works, works that could be read at rallies. I became more active, not just in writing but as an organiser," she told the journalist Val Wilmer in 1985. [...]
In 1975 she married the sculptor and visual artist Melvin Edwards, whose work appeared on some of her book covers. Her band, the Firespitters, which featured Denardo, provided a complementary jazz-funk-blues response to Cortez's rhythmic, often incantatory delivery, her mood ranging from militancy to lyricism, dynamic surrealism to raw emotion. She spoke compellingly of social and environmental issues in a global context; fought injustice wherever she found it; was in the frontline struggle for racial and gender equality; and celebrated the all-pervading power of music.
For
The New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote:
Ms. Cortez’s work was beyond category by virtue of embodying so many categories simultaneously: written verse, African and African-American oral tradition, the discourse of political protest, and jazz and blues. Meant for the ear even more than for the eye, her words combine a hurtling immediacy with an incantatory orality. […]
It was as if her verse, which often took on large, painful subjects like racism and misogyny, had become an instrument itself — an instrument, Ms. Cortez felt strongly, to be wielded in the service of social change.
In one of her best-known works, “If the Drum Is a Woman,” for instance, she indicts violence against women. (The title invokes Duke Ellington’s 1956 composition “A Drum Is a Woman”)
Cortez’s work really is powerful. Have a listen.
Here is the poem:
“If The Drum Is A Woman”
If the drum is a woman
why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol whipping your drum at dawn
why are you shooting through the head of your drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse your drum
I know the night is full of displaced persons
I see skins striped with flames
I know the ugly disposition of underpaid clerks they constantly menstruate through the eyes
I know bitterness embedded in flesh
the itching alone can drive you crazy
I know that this is America and chicken are coming home to roost
on the MX missile
But if the drum is a woman
why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are you saying disrespectful things
to your mother drum your sister drum
your wife drum and your infant daughter drum
If the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don’t reject your drum don’t try to dominate your drum
don’t become weak and cold and desert your drum
don’t be forced into the position
as an oppressor of drums and make a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse our drum…….
I find Cortez’s point as powerful today as it was when she wrote it nearly 75 years ago.
Olivia Bates writes about Cortez’s tribute to John Coltrane, and its layers of meaning, on her Black Arts Movement blog.
Jayne Cortez’s poem, How Long Has This Trane Been Gone, is a tribute to a dead Black artist, but also a powerful call to keep the Black Arts Movement in the hearts and minds of the Black People. It is a beautiful, lyrical tribute to John Coltrane and the powerful Blackness of his craft. Her words also chastise the listener to not forget the origins of Blues and Jazz, and the hardships the early artists had to overcome. It is a poem about embracing the history and going forward without cultural dilution.
Listen to her tribute, over the potent bass of Richard Davis.
When I think about jazz poets, I think of Sonia Sanchez as our Queen Mother.
From her Poetry Foundation bio:
Poet, playwright, professor, activist and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Studies movement, Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother died when she was very young and Sanchez was raised by her grandmother, until she too died when the author was six years old. Sanchez eventually moved to Harlem with her father, a schoolteacher, in 1943. She earned a BA from Hunter College in 1955 and attended graduate school at New York University, where she studied with the poet Louise Bogan. Sanchez also attended workshops in Greenwich Village, where she met poets such as Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Etheridge Knight, whom she later married. During the early 1960s Sanchez was an integrationist, supporting the ideas of the Congress of Racial Equality. But after listening to the ideas of Malcolm X, her work and ideas took on a separationist slant. She began teaching in 1965, first on the staff of the Downtown Community School in New York and later at San Francisco State College (now University). There she was a pioneer in developing Black Studies courses, including a class in African American women’s literature.
[…]
Summing up the importance of Sanchez’s work, Kalamu ya Salaam concluded in Dictionary of Literary Biography: “Sanchez is one of the few creative artists who have significantly influenced the course of black American literature and culture.” In an interview with Susan Kelly for African American Review, Sanchez concluded, “It is that love of language that has propelled me, that love of language that came from listening to my grandmother speak black English… It is that love of language that says, simply, to the ancestors who have done this before you, ‘I am keeping the love of life alive, the love of language alive. I am keeping words that are spinning on my tongue and getting them transferred on paper. I’m keeping this great tradition of American poetry alive.’”
Listen to Sanchez in this video from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. She evokes Max Roach’s drumming in this reading of “10 Haikus for Max Roach.” Sanchez penned the haiku to mark the passing of her friend and jazz drummer Max Roach. The work is included in the collection, Morning Haiku, published in 2010.
Join me in the comments for even more jazz poetry—from both our poet elders and from young people who are carrying on the tradition.