Jazz and Music in Langston Hughes' Works

Langston Hughes is remembered as a prolific African American author, one of the bestknown writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who is best known for his poetry celebrating black culture and using the rhythms of jazz and the blues.

The theme of this research paper is to proof that all of Langston Hughes's work. His use of the tempos of blues and swing in his poetry set Hughes apart from other writers of the time, permitting him to trial with a very rhythmic form of free verse (Ostrom, 69).

Musical Themes in Langston Hughes Works

Hughes began writing poetry early. In high school in Cleveland, where he was elected class poet, qualified for the honor roll, and edited the school yearbook, he read and developed interest in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. These poets, as well as black poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Claude McKay, were to exert a great influence on his verse. One of his most memorable and widely anthologized poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” composed soon after he completed school and dedicated to W. E. B. Du Bois, was met with acclaim and was eventually published in The Crisis, the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Like the great rivers of the world, black people's culture will endure and deepen because of the strength of the black soul and imagination, the poem assures (Leach, 24).

Another part of this black identity that is a theme in itself is blues or jazz music. This is not only expressed through the titles and story in his poems, as they are in "The Weary Blues," "He made that poor piano moan with melody" (10), but also in other poetic forms. In the lines, "Play it, / Jazz band! / You know that tune / That laughs and cries at the same time" ("Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret," 9-12), the gradual increase in line length mimics the flow of music, starting with short and pronounced notes and then falling into a more relaxed and smooth style. Another musical aspect of certain Hughes poems is the repetition of lines.

This appears both as a repetition of a single line as would appear in a musical verse, such as the line, "Oh, silver rivers of the soul!" in "Jazzonia" (2, 8, 15), and of a set of lines as would appear in a musical chorus, such as the lines, "So long, / So far away / Is Africa" (1-3, 10-12) and, "So long, / So far away / Is Africa's / Dark face" (21-24) in "Afro-American Fragment." Though rhyme is a common element of poetry, it is also important in music, and it shows up to that effect in many instances. One example is in the lines, "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 ...