Stills and Hurston

When Zora Neale Hurston collaborated with William Grant Still to create a "suite" of Caribbean-inspired songs she did not realize that calypso music would become immensely popular when it was later championed by Harry Belafonte. This cycle of songs shows the confluence of music and poetry begun in the jazz-influenced poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, particularly in the "Weary Blues" of Langston Hughes. Returning to traditional rhythms in poetry brought about the environment within which the ballad, the blues stanza, and the back-beat would create first the "folk music revival" in the work of Farina, Dylan, Baez, and so on--and R&B and then Rock music. The research of Hurston and of such pioneers as Howard Odum and John and Alan Lomax, who worked to record prison songs and common folk idioms of the rural South brought the beginning of an understanding to Anglo listeners of a style of music that would profoundly influence the remainder of the Twentieth Century.
Check out the music:  Caribbean Suite
Here are paraphrases a few of the notes Hurston made on the first four of these pieces:
1.  Two Banana:  A jumping dance from New Providence (Bahamas).  Jumps are set off both by words and rattle.
2. Going to My Old Home:  Dance song from New Providence. A holiday rhythm made for Christmas.
3. Bellamina:  Ballad from New Providence.  During Prohibition an American gun-runner had three ships, including the Bellamina, the Maizie, and the Mystery. They had success smuggling from Nassau into Miami, Key west and other spots on the Florida coast.  The Bellamina (called the "flagship" by Hurston) was captured by the Coast Guard.  When she reappeared in Nassau, she no longer looked so beautiful.  She had been painted black.  Song-makers "put her in sing," expressing surprise at her change of color, but joy to see her.
4.  Peas and Rice:  Jumping Dance from Cat Island. Represents an argument in the market place over the price of peas and rice. Shopkeeper pretends he will throw them away rather than sell. They compromise, and Roland, a handsome young man, is urged to "roll it."
5.   Mama, I Saw a Sailboat:  Ring play from New Providence.  A very young girl talks to her mother about her unusual love affair with a "yaller boy" whom she cannot marry because (presumably) her color is either lighter or darker, but with whom she has had a very satisfactory "torrid" affair.
6. Evalina: "Humorous Song" from Eleuthera Island. A brief but "sultry" affair has left the woman demanding marriage, which the man admits is right, but proceeds to decline in numerous ways.
7. Doo Ma: Jumping Dance from Abaco Island). The island is celebrated, especially the "wire waist" (narrow waist) and seductively rotating hips of the island women.
8. Hela Grand Pere: Rada Chant from Haiti.  A melody chanted at the beginning of all "Rada" ceremonies. [note from me: Rada is ritual drumming that is part of Voodoo. There are groups of drums for different ceremonies, and the Rada group consists of three drums, The Manman, Segon and Boula - and a bell called the Ogan. In the absence of a bell, the blade of a hoe or other metal implement is substituted.]
9.  Do An' Nannie:  Jumping Dance from New Providence.
10. Ah, La Sa Wu!:  Chant from Fox Hill. Ancient African--Hurston knows no English translation.
11.  Hand a' Bowl: Voodoo Chant from Jamaica.  Goat song, performed over the stone tomb of someone dead eighteen months, a length of time during which the soul ( called the "duppie") is supposed to have had time to "settle down."  The sacrifice of the goat ceremony involves the hand being on the bowl to catch the blood that will flow from the goat's throat (the knife is poised). Just as the goat is tied, the duppie is supposed to be tied. There is a reference to daylight coming at the end of the ceremony.  Some African words not known.  [note from me: This ceremony bears a strong resemblance to the evocation of the dead in the Odyssey, Book Eleven, when Odysseus cspills the blood of a goat in order to summon spirits of the dead who are bound then to speak and tell what they know.]

Langston Hughes and the Weary Blues

Hughes tried to capture the multifaceted nature of blues in his poems, and the nuanced feeling of the jazz played by musicians he came to know well.  Although The Weary Blues first appeared in 1926, Hughes gave it its definitive feel when he  recited the poems on the album Weary Blues (MGM, 1959) with music by Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather. There is therefore a distinctly different feeling for the sounds of both jazz and blues conveyed in the recording from the one that Hughes would have had and responded to at the time he wrote the poems, which were composed between 1921 and 1926 (Hughes was born in 1902).
One should also note that the political nature of Hughes's work was more overt than it seems now.  His first (and indeed his last) poems appeared in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois. This magazine published more of his poems than any other magazine or journal.
Hughes wrote fiction as well (The Ways of White Folks in the 1930s) and children's books, including The Block and a posthumous work titled Black Misery.  In the Depression years, he participated in the Federal Writer's and Artist's program, continuing to protest the system of discrimination and celebrating negro people as human, and humanly beautiful.  His work is accessible, and therefore sometimes not valued by academia as it should.  Perhaps Montage of a Dream Deferred (beginning on page 387 of the Collected Poems) is his version of the modernist long poem?