Read a Langston Hughes poem on 'Jazz as Communication'

Read Langston Hughes’ most famous poems

The writer is considered one of the most important voices in American verse, noted for his use of authentic vernacular, vivid imagery, and jazz-inspired rhythm in poems such as “Harlem,” “I, Too,” and “The Weary Blues.

Hughes' poems brought blues and jazz to poetry

Poets like Walt Whitman and Claude McKay inspired Hughes, but he was also enamored with blues and jazz music. The styles informed the way he structured his verses, with Hughes employing repetition and rhythm in ways similar to the standard 12-bar blues form and playing with meter in a way that recalled the improvisation of jazz.

Watch Langston Hughes perform with a jazz quintet

In 1958, Hughes performed with a jazz group on a Vancouver television show before appearing at the University of British Columbia. Hughes reads "Hey!" from his 1927 collection "Fine Clothes to the Jew" before performing 1925's "The Weary Blues."

Hughes' 'Black Nativity' reworked the Christmas story through jazz improvisation

Although he’s primarily known as a poet, Langston Hughes was also a popular playwright. One of his most inventive works is the 1961 stage show “Black Nativity,” which told the story of Christ’s birth with an all-Black cast. Hughes’ original script encourages improvisation, calling on his love of jazz, and includes 27 songs.

Langston Hughes wrote a foundational text for the Harlem Renaissance

Although the 1920s artistic movement lacked formal leaders, Hughes' 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" established him as one of its figureheads. Hughes' piece argues that Black artists should not be ashamed of their race; instead, they should embrace it, while simultaneously pursuing their own individual artistic visions.

Langston Hughes performed with Muddy Waters at the Newport Jazz Fest

Hughes became involved with the Rhode Island music festival in 1956, sensing an opportunity to introduce the predominantly white audience to Black culture. In 1960, he helped book Muddy Waters for a blues session that featured the music alongside Hughes' poetic explanation of its history. The final song of the set, "Goodbye Newport Blues," found Waters' pianist singing lyrics Hughes had written earlier that day.

'The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ introduced a teenage Hughes to the literary world

While traveling to Mexico to visit his father, Hughes began scrawling “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” as he crossed the Mississippi River, using the river as a metaphor for the Black experience. The poem was published in 1921 in the Crisis, an NAACP magazine edited by WEB DuBois, kickstarting Hughes’ literary career.

Jazz was an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance

The Great Migration transformed New York City's Harlem neighborhood into the epicenter of Black American art, with artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith regularly performing. The music not only provided the backbeat to the cultural scene—it often influenced it, with Harlem Renaissance poets, in particular, inspired by jazz's approach to rhythm and improvisation.

Jazz's popularity inspired a moral panic

When jazz exploded in the 1920s, some believed the music's sudden popularity was the sign of a rotten nation, with one 1920 address at the University of Wisconsin proclaiming, "We are in deadly fear of the Jazz Devil, the demon which is consuming the country." Often, the connections were racialized, with columnists and preachers suggesting that jazz's Black artists were attempting to degrade white America.

Beats emphasized the importance of 'spontaneous prose'

Beat writer Jack Kerouac believed literature should aim to be more like jazz, using improvisation to burrow down to the root of the subconscious. In this video from the University of Pennsylvania’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry course, Professor Al Filreis directs a conversation of Kerouac’s manifesto, “Essential of Spontaneous Prose.”

Jean-Paul Sartre was amazed by American jazz

The French philosopher wrote about a 1947 trip to a New York jazz club as a transcendent experience, describing the magic of the relationship between performer and audience: "You shout, they shriek, they whistle, they are possessed, you are possessed."

Wynton Marsalis believes syncopation is part of jazz's American character

The trumpeter argues that jazz's approach to syncopation is part of an American tradition that offers the unexpected, citing Jonas Salk, Mark Twain, and fusion cuisine as parallels.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Jazz improvisations are often based on well-known standards

Similar to blues, folk, and country music, jazz relies on a shared tradition of common songs that its artists learn, cover, and rework in their own unique ways. Jazz musicians are often able to easily improvise with other musicians because they share a knowledge of the songs and their languages.

Free jazz embraced the avant-garde

Ornette Coleman's 1959 album "The Shape of Jazz to Come" abandoned traditional notions of melody and structure, inadvertently creating "free jazz," a subgenre that embraced absolute musical freedom and gained popularity in the countercultural 1960s.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

The word 'jazz' evolved from slang for 'energy'

Linguists believe the word came from "jasm," which referred to vitality. Its earliest known appearance in print dates back to 1912, referring to a baseball pitcher's curveball. It began being used to describe music a few years later.

Camus was influenced by American culture, especially literature and jazz

He loved the work of writers like William Faulker and Ernest Hemingway, and loved drinking whiskey and listening to jazz. He also admired the actor Humphrey Bogart and his striking performance in the noir classic "The Big Sleep." He was delighted when his wife gave him a Burberry raincoat, thinking it made him look more like Bogart.

Basquiat's art was text heavy

Like his graffiti, Basquiat’s drawings and paintings often featured words and phrases among images. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson said, “[i]t’s as if he were dripping letters.” Below is 1983’s Horn Players, which includes portraits of jazz greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, along with words Basquiat associated with them.

Watch Billie Holiday perform in 'The Sound of Jazz'

The 1957 CBS special, part of its series "The Seven Lively Arts," was a landmark broadcast that brought some of jazz's biggest names—including Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Count Basie—to a national audience. Watch Holiday offer a stirring rendition of "Fine and Mellow" below.

Hear 2 jazz pianists analyze 'Getz/Gilberto'

The 1964 bossa nova classic won the Grammy for album of the year, a rare feat for a jazz record. According to jazz pianists Peter Martin and Adam Maness, that also makes it one of the last truly popular jazz albums. In this episode of their podcast "You'll Hear It," they break down the musicality of the songs in real time, offering technical insights into every quirk and nuance.

Ginsberg's 'Howl' portrayed people outside the American mainstream

The poem’s portraits of people on society's fringes—including vivid descriptions of drug use, psychiatric wards, and homosexuality—led to its seizure by US Customs agents and the arrest of its publisher Ferlinghetti. The American Civil Liberties Union defended both in a landmark trial that ruled the book was not obscene.

Watch writer John Steinbeck's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

In the '60s, Bob Dylan often trolled the media, mocking its focus on celebrity

This 1965 press conference, just before the release of the landmark "Bringing It All Back Home," illustrates how fed up he'd become, laughing at inane questions and offering snide responses. When asked if he thinks of himself more as a singer or as a poet, he responds, "I think of myself more as a song and dance man."

'Frank Sinatra Has a Cold' is one of the seminal works of New Journalism

The profile broke with convention by focusing on the story of pursuing the story rather than one that celebrated the subject. Vanity Fair called it "the greatest literary-nonfiction story of the 20th century." (Some users may experience a paywall.)

A linguist argues Jane Austen's language is what defines her fiction

While many readers love Austen's novels for their characters and their romantic plots, Chi Luu argues that many people (including literary luminaries like Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Waldo Emerson) underestimate how her adept wordplay, sense of irony, and memorable turns of phrase are what have made readers fall in love with her fiction for centuries.

Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’ set the template for hip-hop composition

This 1982 single is one of the most recognizable beats in hip-hop history, thanks to some inspiration from popular disco and new wave records. The song’s bigger contribution, though, is that it pushed lyrics front and center, turning the rapper from a party-rocking master of ceremonies into a truth-telling MC.

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

Listen to an in-depth conversation on the links between Parkinson's disease and herbicide exposure and the challenging pace of scientific investigation.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states