2002
SAMLA
Blue Notes:
Jazz History, Fiction, and Poetics
Steven A.
Nardi
Medgar Evers College
Do not cite without permission of author.
"'Jazzaphobia':
Langston Hughes and the Fear of Black Music"
Langston
Hughes's 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
is commonly taught as the definitive statement of jazz poetics-a poetics
that asserts the liberation of black poetry from Western Culture through
recovering authentic African American music and oral traditions. In particular,
Hughes's accomplishment in that essay and throughout the twenties is viewed
as the key to development of a poetics derived from music. It is exactly
the subordination, then, of poetry to music that is understood as enlivening
Hughes's poetry.
In this spirit, Arnold Rampersad writes about Langston Hughes's 1928 book,
Fine Clothes to the Jew,
Hughes clearly showed that he had begun to see his own learned poetic
art … as inferior to that of "ordinary" blacks…. At
the heart of his sense of inferiority-which empowered rather than debilitated
Hughes-was the knowledge that he (and other would-be poets) stood to a
great extent outside the culture he worshipped. ("Fine Clothes"146-7)
As I have said, the assumption that African American poetics, to succeed
in authentically representing the culture, must accept a subordination
to folk forms and mass consciousness provides critical advantages for
critics interpreting black culture. Steven Tracy, for example, in Langston
Hughes and the Blues (1988) makes the case that Hughes's poetry exists
in a shadow only lifted through knowledge of the blues tradition. His
book epitomizes the tendency to tell the story of Hughes's development
of the blues poem as a heroic discovery and appropriation of a new poetic
form. Tracy assumes that African American poetry is fundamentally rooted
in oral culture and that there is a march of progress across the twentieth
century of black poetry re-finding and reclaiming its oral roots. The
mission of the black poet, as Tracy represents Hughes's thought, is to
bridge the gap between the folk mind and the mind of the educated African
American intellectual. But that encounter is not an encounter between
equals. He writes,
… Hughes knew that he didn't need to make the folk his primary audience,
though he certainly attempted to express aspects of the folk experience.
He didn't need to interpret their lives for them because they already
recognized their own beauty, and, because of their grounding in orality,
they were already artists themselves. (46)
The black masses, Tracy argues, are already artists. They have no need
for poetry because they already understand themselves perfectly through
an oral tradition that Tracy equates with the blues. Art, in other words,
is wasted on the black masses because it is superfluous. African American
poetry, in Tracy's account of Hughes's thinking, is always the junior
cousin of the oral tradition, trying to refine itself out of existence
in order to provide the closest possible experience of the real, authentic,
blues voice that antedates and supersedes it.
So while Rampersad is certainly right to say that Hughes saw jazz as empowering,
it is equally clear that this prescription is intrinsically debilitating
to poetry. In portraying the most accomplished expression of black culture
as outside of poetry-outside, even, of his own culture-Hughes locates
the very objective of his poetic project as beyond a poet's grasp. Music
supplants, even renders superfluous, poetry's irreducible medium-language.
I call this subordination of poetry to music "jazzaphobia,"
because jazz is at once an object of desire-the source of a purified inspiration-and
a source of fear-because it represents the subordination of poetry to
a signifying system alien to language.
Further, a jazzaphobic approach to culture devalues individual subjectivity
in favor of a valorization of mass consciousness. For example, mass consciousness,
as opposed to individual subjectivity, is the sole source of poetic value
in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The word "individuality"
in that essay as a result paradoxically refers to a collective identity.
This becomes clear when Hughes measures the problem the black poet faces:
"But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art
in America-this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour
racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to
be as little Negro and as much American as possible" [emphasis added]
(692). Hughes makes clear the "individuality" at issue here
is a racial type, not the individual subjectivity of the poet. In writing,
"They [the common people] furnish a wealth of distinctive material
for any artist," Hughes does not refer to an individuality of the
singular unique subjectivity, but rather to an individuality rooted in
the common characteristics of a race. Mass culture has value, Hughes continues,
exactly "because they [the common people] still hold their own individuality
in the face of American standardization" (693). To create "Negro
art," then, and Hughes's own poetic project, is first and foremost
a matter of finding a distinction between social identities, between the
"mold of American standardization," and what he understands
as the "racial individuality" that is black identity. Individuality
here must remain plural: "they" hold "their" individuality.
The conflict, then, is one that can't be solved within the singular subject.
For Hughes, then, music solves a basic problem in Harlem Renaissance aesthetics-how
to link the elite artist to mass culture, which authorizes the poet's
production and aesthetics. This hierarchy can also be seen as a reaction
to Du Bois's ideal of the "talented tenth," in that jazz poetry
is a reaction to an older generation's ideal of cultural progress in favor
of the young avant-garde. Accepting as a premise that writing is an inadequate
stand-in for music, of course, presents a grave problem for the poet-whose
medium is in modern culture inextricably linked to the written word. The
moment where jazz and poetry meet, therefore, is a moment of extreme anxiety
in Hughes's work. While jazz, as "the Negro Artist" claims,
may represent what he calls an "inherent expression," that all
powerful expression cannot be made available through writing.
Unsurprisingly, this anxiety is particularly evident when a poem attempts
to directly represent music. For example, in the poem "Ma Man,"
first published in 1926 and later included in Fine Clothes to the Jew
(1927), Hughes represents the moment when poem and music coincide as both
a moment of the highest inspiration, and simultaneously as a moment when
the written text fragments. The poem reads,
He kin play a banjo.
Lordy, he kin plunk, plunk, plunk.
He kin play a banjo.
I mean plunk, plunk … plunk, plunk.
He plays good when he's sober
An' better, better when he's drunk.
The repetition of lines two and four is a convention of the blues stanza
form, but that repetition also becomes a conscious correction. The speaker
clarifies herself in the fourth line, saying, "I mean." The
second set of repetitions, then, is the one privileged. The speaker repeats
these as if clarifying herself, implying that the fourth line comes closer
to fully expressing her meaning. In fact, this is strange, because when
spoken the repetition of "plunk" in the line "Lordy, he
kin plunk, plunk, plunk" is much more rhythmic, and therefore one
would think a better representation of music, than the repetition in "I
mean plunk, plunk … plunk, plunk," which defies any attempt
to read it musically because it is interrupted by the ellipsis. The ellipsis,
marking a point where the line falters, ruins whatever rhythm with which
you were reading the first syllables.
But in the context of the jazzaphobic subordination of language to music,
this second try at imitation of the banjo is the better representation
of music exactly because it is impossible to read the words rhythmically.
Music's ultimate presence, in this poem, is signified by the failure of
words. The "special communication," identified with music, is
represented by a gap between the words-the space marked by the ellipsis.
In ellipsis, words fail, and other, outside, signification is deferred
to, literally by the ink on the page which denotes a point where language
falters. The burden of signification in this gap is shifted onto music.
In other words, jazz offers both the seductive possibility of collective
secrets revealed, and the silencing and bankruptcy of the medium (writing)
through which the poet would turn those secrets into art. The disruptive
presence of perfect expression is signified with a textual mark that indicates
a lack of meaning-an ellipsis. By fixing music-with its powerful multiplicity
of meanings-with graphic signs that denote the presence of music through
the disruption of written meaning, "Ma Man" reveals the collision
and intermixing of writing, the inexpressible, and nonsense. In the process,
this ellipsis reveals that the special form of communication that music
embodies is essentially anti-poetic. Music is at once the site of the
greatest significance, and the site where poetry is emptied out of meaning.
Critically, however, although the jazzaphobic impulse might be always
present in poetry that appeals to music for meaning, there are more and
less productive uses to which this paradoxical experience might be put.
James Baldwin, for example, explicitly condemns the reliance on meanings
outside of language within Hughes's poetry in his notoriously scathing
1959 review of Hughes's Selected Poems, titled "Sermon and Blues."
For Baldwin, the intersection of music and poetry in Hughes's work is
merely a failure of Hughes's imagination. Baldwin refers to Hughes's use
of black music and culture in the language of secret codes, at one point
calling it "hieroglyphics." He criticizes Hughes for not "forc[ing]"
these glyphs "into the realm of art where their meaning would become
clear and overwhelming" ("Sermon," 86). John Hollander
makes a similar point about the relationship between music and poetry
in Vision and Resonance (1985). Hollander writes that "the music
of poetry" is fundamentally a metaphor, and a metaphor that "yokes
by violence together what have become dissimilar activities" (10).
Both Hollander and Baldwin insist that a poem must employ a type of violence-"force"-in
its appeal to music in order to make the poem meaningful. "'Hey,
pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!,'" Baldwin writes, quoting lines from Hughes's
1951 poem "Dream Boogie," "conveys much more on Lenox Avenue
than it does in this book, which is not the way it ought to be" ("Sermon"
86). Hughes's poetry, according to Baldwin, falls short from doing anything
with this language of secret signs. "Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!,"
Baldwin argues, which in the context of Lenox Avenue is meaningful, flattens
into nonsense in Hughes's poem. This poetry can only refer to these hidden
meanings with an empty gesture, depending on the reader to decode them
using a frame of reference outside and apart from the poem. The poetry
itself, therefore, has the epistemological value of a road sign.
Baldwin's argument is that Hughes simply accepts the subordination of
his poems to an outside source of meaning without protest or even awareness
of the effect on a poem. Hughes, Baldwin claims, does not attempt to exploit
the irony of this situation. In the appeal to language only meaningful
on Lenox Avenue, Baldwin implies, there is no accommodation of the poem's
inevitable failure to capture the significance it gestures at. There is
only the hope that the audience will supply the missing context that turns
"Hey, pop! / Re-bop! / Mop!" into a poetically meaningful phrase.
But in this, Baldwin underestimates Hughes's poetic sophistication. My
purpose here is to defend Hughes against both his critics and his friends.
Hughes seems quite aware of the problem of a jazzaphobic hierarchy. This
can be seen, I have been arguing, in the ellipsis in "Ma Man,"
but further, it is central in the book which Rampersad and others take
as the epitome of Hughes's achievement in the jazz poem form. Because
if Fine Clothes to the Jew, like "The Negro Artist," celebrates
jazz as the source of the black poet's creativity, it also raises questions
about how the poet can escape the consequences of the subordination of
language to music that this implies. If Fine Clothes includes "Ma
Man," a poem whose ellipses I have used as an example of graphical
subordination of poetry to music, the book also includes elements that
struggle to find a means of turning attention away from music and back
towards the medium poetry is made of-language. In that, this book is certainly,
as Rampersad writes in "Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew,"
"the perfect companion piece" to "The Negro Artist,"
but because it more fully explores the contradiction that underlies the
aesthetics of discovery that "The Negro Artist" inaugurates.
Understanding the importance of jazzaphobia reveals the extent to which
Hughes's work, even in Fine Clothes, where poetry It is worth a moment
to consider the structure of the book itself which underscores the books
jazzaphobic dilemma. The volume opens with the poem "Hey," and
closes with "Hey Hey," two poems that in 1932 were published
as one two-stanza poem titled "Night and Morn" (Collected, 627).
The book as a whole, therefore, can be read as a collection of stanzas
for an extended lyric poem. The specificity of the reference to time,
also suggests a single oral performance-"Hey" is set at dusk,
"Hey Hey" at dawn as if the poet has been up all night. The
space between "Hey," and "Hey Hey"-the space in which
the poems in the volume occur-also suggests the space between a repetition,
like the structure of jazz. In fact, the very lack of a grammatical connection
between the words (shouldn't there be a comma? or two exclamation points?)
removes any distraction from the title's status as a repetition. We are
given no hints even on how to say these two "Heys," only confronted
with them twice.
On the face of it, then, Fine Clothes elaborately frames itself as a piece
of music: the poems like movements, the words like notes. The music analogy
is extended once again in the recording The Weary Blues with Langston
Hughes that Hughes made in 1958. The opening track, "Blues Montage,"
begins with "Hey," and that section of the album ends with "Hey
Hey." But the book's aspiration to become music is only an appearance.
The more the poems explore their own structure, the more they rediscover
language. "Hey" and "Hey Hey" do not, as one might
expect them to, present the arrival of the blues as wholly good, or the
departure of the music as wholly bad. Instead, they insist on including
the price that must be paid for the elevation of music over poetry as
the source of meaning. The blues voice originates, these poems declare,
in compulsion. In "Hey" the singer has no control over his or
her song:
Sun's a settin',
This is what I'm gonna sing.
Sun's a settin'.
This is what I'm gonna sing:
I feels de blues a comin,
Wonder what de blues'll bring?
The speaker is left a spectator-only able to "wonder" what is
going to happen. He or she cannot know what is coming. The blues arrives
and departs uncontrollably. It arrives and departs with the force of nature
evident in the immutability of the weather, or the rising and setting
of the sun. These are cycles tied to an elemental force, not to a poet's
will. Of course, on balance, this compulsion would seem to be a good thing.
The speaker begins to sing. He or she begins to feel. Though the blues
may leave the speaker bewildered, they have made him or her an artist.
In the second bookend poem, "Hey Hey," the return of day and
the close of the song/poem/book signify the return of control, yet because
art is founded on compulsion, the return of human agency may also choke
inspiration off. The poem reads,
Sun's a risin',
This is gonna be ma song.
Sun's a risin',
This is gonna be ma song.
I could be blue but
I been blue all night long.
"This is gonna be ma song" may be taken in a negative sense;
in this reading, the speaker claims that this is going to be all of "ma
song" that there is ever going to be. Along with the passing of the
blues, the poet's music and voice is the passing. Likewise, the singer
seems to be worn out by the music and ready to be done with it. At first
glance, then, the pair of poems narrate an aesthetic founded on an inhuman
automatic process. The force that gives the poems their meaning is unalterably
outside the two poems and their speaker-derived from something wholly
uncanny. This is a mass consciousness taking hold of the speaker.
But is the end of the blues the end or beginning of poetry? These lines
can also be convincingly read as underscoring the new, possessive, adjective
"ma"; now, the speaker can also be understood to mean, this
new song that comes with the break of day is going to be mine-in contrast
to what has come before, which was not mine. "Ma song," in this
reading, signifies the return of voice, human control and possession.
The passing of the blues, in this second reading, liberates the individual
human artist's voice. The singer's voice not only persists past the time
when the blues depart, but is even liberated from its previous captivity.
This is underscored by final two lines, which, in sharp contrast to the
compulsion of the initial lines of "Hey," present the poet as
making a choice to move beyond the blues with represent a style now fully
explored.
We can recognize this mini-drama, confined to the literal margins of the
text, as the attempt to locate in the time before and after a blues performance
a poetry that escapes the gravitational pull of music. Despite their ostensible
imposition of the hierarchy of music over poetry, these poems reveal the
reassertion of poetry and voice in the margins of the all encompassing
signification of the music. Although the structure of the book itself
seems to aspire to imitate music, it does so in a way that calls attention
to the limitations the blues imposes on language. Further, the book's
structure also insists that poetry bubbles up inevitably, marked by the
loss of that central, unifying, meaning, but redeemed by being within
the province of an individuality.
The same jazzaphobic dynamic is identifiable in the poem that gives the
book its title (usually ascribed to-or blamed on-Carl Van Vechten). Fine
Clothes to the Jew takes its title from a line in the poem, "Hard
Luck," that raises the problem of what the cost of producing the
blues is, and how that cost is to be paid. The lines run,
When bad luck overtakes you
Nothin' for you to do.
When hard luck overtakes you
Nothin' for you to do.
Gather up yo' fine clothes
An' sell 'em to de Jew.
In the title, the "fine clothes" can be understood to refer
to the poems themselves, emphasizing the gesture of stripping away. Thus,
the method by which the poems are produced in this volume is indeed founded
on the abandonment of poetry itself-at least to the extent that poetry
is synonymous with "finery" or conventions of beauty. "In
Fine Clothes to the Jew," Rampersad writes, Hughes takes the blues
"to their stripped and bare extreme" (Rampersad 1986, 160).
In getting rid of his clothes, the speaker literalizes Rampersad's metaphor.
Rampersad means to argue that in "stripping away" poetic conventions
(the "fine clothes") Hughes reveals the new possibilities for
poetics hidden in the bluesman's vernacular voice. But it is important
to notice the very temporary endurance of this model of poetry-the aspect
Hughes draws attention to by figuring the exchange through the metaphor
of the Jew, who is, after all, meant to invoke a pawnshop. "Hard
Luck" shows this process of "stripping down" to be temporal-it
is a gesture. This is a sale, but one sells to a pawnshop at a loss. The
underlying racism of the poem speaks also to this dilemma. A Jew is, of
course, understood to be a shark, and the speaker gains time by submitting
to him. It is not a true sale, but rather the assumption of a debt that
the speaker in "Hard Luck" acknowledges will never be paid.
This is less a new state of being, in other words, than the deferment
of the moment of accountability. Again, the limiting role of time is implicit
also in the structure of the book itself. By drawing attention to itself
as a moment-one that begins at dusk and ends at dawn- Fine Clothes, like
"Hard Luck," confines itself within a moment that must inevitably
pass.
Similarly, in "Ma Man" the lines "He plays good when he's
sober / An' better, better when he's drunk" demonstrate a similar
attribution of the power of blues significance to create a deficit along
with an aesthetic moment. Inspiration comes from an outside, intrusive
and inevitably destructive source. In the case of "Ma Man,"
the banjo player's very drunkenness provides the essential element of
skill. The blues are about precisely this moment of being overwhelmed,
but the poems also try to find a way around this problem through an aesthetic
production that happens despite music and only in its absence. Hughes
not only leaves room for authentic poetic production outside of music
and mass consciousness's influence, he underscores the need for poetry
that emerges, fundamentally, for literary language and the written sign.
In The Big Sea, Hughes distances himself from the title Fine Clothes to
the Jew, which would seem to argue against reading too much into it. Recounting
the public outcry the title provoked among those who found it anti-Semitic,
Hughes proclaimed himself indifferent to what the book was actually called
(Big Sea 264).Yet his alternate choice for the title, "Brass Spittoons"
also dramatizes the impossibility of shedding finery and convention without
cost. It can even be read as an attempt to recover the power of the conventional
beauty of language.
In "Brass Spittoons" the speaker attempts to separate out his
oppressive existence cleaning spittoons from his attempt to lead a spiritual
life. But even as he attempts to assert the separation of the product
from the conditions of production, his thoughts are constantly interrupted
by an oppressive voice-"Hey Boy!"
Clean the spittoons, boy.
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
The steam in hotel kitchens,
And the slime in hotel spittoons:
Part of my life.
Hey boy!
The problem in this passage is to escape the slime which is the same anywhere.
The voice comes in as the speaker tries to distinguish the slime and degrading
work from his own life. The pathos of "part of my life" is the
calm, deliberate tone of the speaker, which gives the reader confidence
he is capable of so much more. It is sound's very immediacy and power
to compel attention that is so threatening in this poem. Sound is associated
with a penetrating means of getting into the brain. The poem, after all,
is violated by that "Hey, boy!" Sound, the outside of the poem,
is cast as the violator. Sound breaks up the speaker's concentration,
violating his isolation from the oppressive world around him. Worse, the
voice of the boss, in the first quoted line, "Clean the spittoons,
boy," becomes part of the speaker's internal monologue in its second
repetition. It is as though the speaker has internalized the voice of
his oppressor.
But, contrary to the resignation and surrender of "Hard Luck,"
it is exactly an aesthetic appreciation that offers the speaker a real
possibility of separating the terms that threaten to overwhelm him. The
speaker imagines sanctifying the products of his labor and therefore separating
them from the oppression that accompanied their production:
A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord
Bright polished brass like the cymbals of King David's dancers,
Like the wine cups of Solomon.
Hey, boy!
In this poem preserving the speaker's individual mind against the pressures
from outside is paramount. And the solution to preserve the sanctity of
the individual mind is the labor of aesthetic production. The speaker
asserts that labor be separated out from the forced conditions that produce
it. The brightness of the brass, the speaker claims, is "beautiful
to the Lord" independently of its use. The speaker's labor, in creating
this 'likeness,' sanctifies the object through making it beautiful-one
can literally see God's work in the shine, which recalls the shining of
the cymbals of King David. Through the likeness produced, its beauty recalls
stories from the Bible. "Brass Spittoons" holds out the hope
that aesthetic value can be "cleaned up" through hard work,
liberated from the political context that tarnishes it. Finery, in this
process, need not be discarded. It is capable of rehabilitation. Although
the "Hey, boy!" continues to intrude upon the speaker's thoughts-rendering
his solution available only within his mind-aesthetic labor retains value.
The inside, aesthetic, world may be delusional, but in contrast to the
provisional space available through "stripping down," the creation
of beauty provides the speaker with an important interior space of his
own. Aesthetics, the product of individuality, is the only safe place
in a world of political repression. Beauty and labor, although they may
not change the speaker's objective situation (he remains oppressed), help
keep the mind and imagination free.
Further, in a reversal of the deferment of the highest significance to
sound, in "Brass Spittoons" sound is the medium of the oppressor's
voice. When a purified, holy music does enter into this poem, it is necessarily
through the medium of written language. The simile "Bright polished
brass like the cymbals of King David's dancers" suggests that the
polished brass recalls the sound and movement of the cymbals and dancers;
the comparison of "bright brass" to "cymbals" does
not simply end with color and shine. "Brass" is a conventional
metaphorical and literal description of music. The word "cymbals"
hints at "symbols," a source of literary meaning. This is a
type of beauty that begins to extend and expand categories of sensing.
Hughes not only hints at the power of words to suggest music, light, and
motion, but poses the highest form of music as one derived from the written
word. In order to be meaningful and protected from the voice, music takes
on fundamentally written/literary qualities of metaphor and literary image.
The production of beauty and meaning becomes a process that is fundamentally
linguistic and written.
In "Brass Spittoons" it is the very inability of the ideas the
words on the page invoke to be realized in sound that creates their special
significance. The literary image hints at meanings that could not exist
in the experience of the senses. Here the very textual nature of written
language is critical to the poem's ability to suggest music. Rather than
a hierarchy in which music makes language secondary and derivative, it
is the metaphoric power of association that produces the musical effect,
not a direct imitative power of words. In suggesting that sound can be
rehabilitated by being subordinated to language, "Brass Spittoons"
brings the hierarchies of jazzaphobia full circle-sound is derivative
of writing. This is a step beyond mere jazzaphobia; the expected subordination
of poetry to music is overturned.
As a poem that reverses the hierarchy of jazzaphobia, "Brass Spittoons"
is telling evidence against Baldwin's impatient dismissal of Hughes's
use of music. It is also evidence against the too simple assumption that
Hughes unproblematically accepted poetry's subordination to music as beneficial
to his art. It is important, in other words, to recognize that Hughes's
creativity does not end with the gesture of "stripping down."
"Brass Spittoons," and other poems, are equally concerned with
how meaning can be built back up while still retaining the creative power
of repetition, but applying it to literary language and even that problematic
finery-poetic convention.
In sum, inserting the term "jazzaphobic" into the critical discourse
around Hughes is important if we are to understand the complexity of Hughes
1920s experiments with poetic form. Hughes's jazz poem was not simply
the discovery of a new, unproblematic, source of poetic inspiration. Instead,
it was an engagement with how far a poet could take the correspondence
between music and the mass cultural tradition of jazz and the blues and
poetry. Jazz is both a source of inspiration for Hughes, and also a crucial
limit on the range of expression poetry can achieve. In particular, the
later jazz poetry needs to be read in the light of a reaction to jazzaphobic
aesthetics. Particularly poems such as "Ask Your Mama" and the
sonnets in Shakespeare in Harlem are a reaction against the implicit limitations
on language Hughes accepts in his early jazz poetry against and an attempt
to use the jazzaphobic dilemma to produce a beauty both true to jazz and
true to language.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. "Sermons and Blues." New York Times 29 March 1959.
Hollander, John. Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography by Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1994.
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The Nation 1926: 692-94.
Rampersad, Arnold. "Langston Hughes's Fine Clothes to the Jew." Callaloo 9.1 (Winter 1986): 144-57.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Tracy, Steven
C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1988.