Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes built a recording legacy that encompassed his own spoken-word releases on Smithsonian-Folkways as well as countless settings of his texts by other performers, some realized through direct collaboration and others completed years later. Although his work became closely identified with Black jazz and blues, the poems and prose surfaced across a wider range of styles, most often taken up by artists who challenged prevailing racial and political orthodoxies. The beatnik milieu of the 1950s and 1960s offered fertile ground, yet Hughes texts continued to appear on recordings well beyond that era.

In the 1970s the Gary Bartz NTU Troop, a modern jazz ensemble unafraid of political subject matter, captured a live rendition of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”—Hughes’s first published poem—under the title “I’ve Known Rivers.” During the late 1950s, blues singer Big Miller recorded eleven songs that Hughes had written expressly for him on the album Did You Ever Hear the Blues? German guitarist Caspar Brötzmann drew on Hughes texts for a 1993 project whose sonic character stood in marked contrast to earlier adaptations by Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte.

Hughes began composing poetry in the eighth grade; although classmates and teachers responded favorably, his parents steered him toward engineering. He excelled in those studies at Columbia University before leaving to pursue writing full time. Over the course of his career he released more than sixteen books of poems, two novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of essays, twenty plays, a volume of children’s poetry, several musicals and operas, three autobiographies, and numerous radio and television scripts along with magazine articles. After his death from cancer in the 1960s, the New York City Preservation Commission designated his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem a landmark; the street itself was subsequently renamed Langston Hughes Place.