"Ain't You Heard"?: The Jazz Poetry of Langston Hughes
It all began with a piano bench. At the age of four, I sat next to my first piano teacher, as she told me the names of the keys. 'This is C, D, E . . . ," she said, her finger touching each key. moving through the entirety of a C-major scale. Afterward she asked, "Now. which one is F?" Though I touched the incorrect key, A instead of F, I remember being fascinated by the realization that I could create music by depressing those keys, making little wooden hammers strike strings in the piano's hidden belly. That fascination never left me. Thirteen years later, during my senior year of high school, I received an acceptance letter from the Berklee College of Music in Boston - one of the world's premier institutions for the study of contemporary music and jazz. Despite receiving a generous partial scholarship, I elected, because of the high cost of tuition and of living in Boston, to complete my core courses at Columbus State University, and after two years, I intended to transfer to Berklee. However, when I took my first upper-level English course in the Fall of 2006, where I read Winnifred Eaton's autobiography, Me: A Book of Remembrance, and composed in response to Eaton's text an autobiographical literary critical essay - a piece of writing that catalyzed my journey toward self-integration after enduring a devastating traumatic experience - I discovered the transcendence that can result from the intersection of life, literature, and criticism. At that point, I decided to obtain a degree in English Literature, but I had yet to discover how I would connect my study of literature to my musical background; in fact, I began to think the former would preclude the latter. When I took African-American Literature II with Dr. Noreen Lape in the Spring of 2007, I was reintroduced to the poetry of Langston Hughes, a poet typically associated with the Harlem Renaissance and known for his poetry drawn from African-American folk idioms, such as the blues and jazz; in fact, he is often credited with being one of the first - if not the first -jazz poet. During the course, Dr. Lape explained to me that while many critics have explored Hughes's jazz poetry, acknowledging that much of his poetry does, indeed, sound jazzy, none had yet to elucidate the musical qualities of his jazz poetry, to communicate how Hughes translated a musical form to the page without losing its inherent qualities in the process. She suggested that my musical background might give me greater insight into the musicality of Hughes's jazz poetry than most critics possess and said I should consider writing my term paper on the topic - a project that later developed into this honors thesis.
African-American, Langston Hughes, Jazz, Newport Jazz Festival, Harlem Renaissance, Literature, African American Studies, American Literature, English Language and Literature, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority
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