VARIATIONS OF JAZZ:

THE LEGACY AND INFLUENCE OF LANGSTON HUGHES ON AMIRI

BARAKA'S VIEWS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC AND THE FUNCTION OF
THE ARTS

A Thesis
Presented to
The Department of English, Modern Languages, and Journalism
EMPORIA STATE UNIVERSITY

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts

by
Yan, Han
May 2011

UMI Number: 1495809

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AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Yan, Han
in

for the

English Literature

Master of Arts
presented on

April 8, 2011

Title: Variations of Jazz: The Legacy and Influence of Langston Hughes on Amiri
Baraka's Views of African American Music and the Function of the Arts
Abstract approved:

4C*4^

Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka share three similarities in the history of African
American literature. Both of them are men of letters, men of music, and men of dreams.
Therefore, Hughes and Baraka reveal their affection towards African American music
and their dream of happiness for all the African Americans in their literary works.
Hughes regarded the blues as well as jazz as one of the most influential African
American arts. Hughes believed this uplifting sorrowful music represented the African
American people's life. Hughes interpreted his feelings and has understanding of jazz in
his lines of poetry, and became known as one of the best jazz poets. Furthermore, Hughes
made great efforts to promote African American arts and encouraged the younger
generation of African American artists. Hughes's views on jazz music and the function of
the arts significantly influenced Baraka. Baraka inherited and developed Hughes's
perspectives through his literary life. Baraka theoretically analyzed the significance and
fundamental role of the blues in African Americans' life. Unlike Hughes who described
his dream and affirmed his faith towards a better life in literary works, Baraka actively
participated in the Black Arts Movement to carry out his dream. Hughes endeavored to
build a new identity combining Black and White identities, while Baraka always tried
instead to confirm and assert his Black identity alone during his life of controversy.

Therefore, the legacy of Hughes influenced Baraka, and Baraka developed Hughes's
viewpoints through his exploration of literature and life. This thesis will present an
exploratory study on the above topic based on the analysis of the history of African
American literature and these two writers' literary works.

ii

_J

d^^LU^

Approved by the Department Chair

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I eagerly take this opportunity to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Kevin J.
Rabas for his constant encouragement during the writing of this thesis and when I was
taking his classes. It was Dr. Rabas who first introduced jazz poetry to me and convinced
me that I was capable of doing this research. Without his many insightful suggestions and
his hearty encouragement, this thesis would never have been completed.
I wish to express appreciation to Dr. Melvin G. Storm and Dr. James F. Hoy for
their classes, for serving in my defense committee, and for their help with my thesis. I
also gained many invaluable suggestions on doing research from Dr. Richard D. Keller
and Dr. Edward C. Emmer through their classes.
I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Weng Dexiu, Dr. Xiaoguang Cheng, Dr.
Ning Ping, and Dr. Wang Bing in Liaoning Normal University, China. During my first
years of graduate study with them, these professors opened my eyes of mind and gave me
many sincere suggestions and insightful thoughts.
Finally, I want to express my deepest love to my parents. Without their love, trust,
and support, I could never be who I am now.

iv
PREFACE
This thesis is a comparative study of the legacy and influence of Langston Hughes
on Amiri Baraka's views of African American music and the function of the arts. From
the perspectives of African American literary history, I unfold my study based on these
two writers' literary works. Chapter I provides a panoramic of this thesis and introduces
the structure as well as my focus in each chapter. Chapter II makes an analysis of
Hughes's legacy and influence, especially of his views on African American music and
the function of the arts, which is the foundation of the next chapter. Chapter III is a
comparative survey of Hughes's influence on Baraka in terms of their views on African
American music and the function of the arts, and this part is the most significant
component of this study. Chapter IV draws a conclusion of the linkages between Hughes
and Baraka and their contributions to the African American literature.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

iii

PREFACE

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION

II. LANGSTON HUGHES'S LEGACY AND INFLUENCE

A. Hughes's Life with Literature

1. Hughes's Early Life

2. Walt Whitman's and Carl Sandburg's Influences on Hughes

10

B. W. E. B. Du Bois's Influence on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

17

1. W. E. B. Du Bois's Influence on Hughes

17

2. Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

20

C. Hughes and Jazz Poetry

24

III. THE LEGACY AND INFLUENCE OF LANGSTON HUGHES ON AMIRI

BARAKA'S VIEWS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC AND THE FUNCTION OF
THE ARTS
A. Baraka's Life with Literature

35
36

1. Baraka's Early Life

36

2. Learning towards a Deep and Intellectual World

42

B. Hughes's Legacy and Influence on Amiri Baraka's Views of African American

Music

47

VI

C. Hughes's Legacy and Influence on Amiri Baraka's Views of the Function of the
Arts

54

1. In the Beat and the Transitional Periods

54

2. In the Black Nationalist Period

58

3. In the Third World Marxist Period

63

IV. CONCLUSION
NOTE
WORKS CITED

73
....76
77

1
I. INTRODUCTION
This thesis presents a comparative study of the legacy and influence of Langston
Hughes on Amiri Baraka's views of African American Music and the function of the arts,
based on my studies of African American literary history as well as my examination of
the key literary texts written by these two writers. Both Langston Hughes and Amiri
Baraka are significant figures in the history of African American literature. Langston
Hughes's outstanding literary works, together with his contributions and influence, stand
as a shining monument in the history of African American literature. His first poem, "The
Negro Speaks of Rivers," declared his life-long pursuit to promote African American
arts, to free African American people from racism, and to make efforts towards freedom
and democracy. Hughes's jazz poem "The Weary Blues" won him first prize from an
Opportunity magazine contest, which started his journey in jazz poetry. At the same time,
Hughes played a crucial role in the Harlem Renaissance between the 1920s and 1930s.
His essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," a declaration of the Harlem
Renaissance, showed his great pride and confidence in African American identity and
African American arts. Hughes also consistently encouraged the young generation of the
African American artists to be proud of their identities and to create distinct African
American arts.
Hughes influenced the generation of African American writers that followed him.
Amiri Baraka was among those influenced. Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, is thirty-two
years younger than Hughes. Baraka was called by critic Theodore R. Hudson "one of the
most gifted, one of the most individual, one of the most versatile, one of the busiest, and
undoubtedly the most influential" of the American artists of the Black Nationalist

2
Movement (xi). First known for his poetry collection Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide
Note (1961), Baraka encouraged African American people to establish their own media,
such as newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and institutions, to advocate Black
Arts during the Black Arts Movement. Baraka studied African American music with
critical vigor and passion, and he wrote about the blues in his book Blues People: Negro
Music in White America. During the last twenty years, Baraka continues to write poetry
and gives public readings of his poems. He remains active. His career has spanned for
more than fifty years.
Hughes's contribution to African American literature had a consequential
influence on Baraka's literary career, especially in terms of his views of African
American music and the function of African American arts. My analysis of Hughes's
influence on Baraka is mainly composed of the following two parts.
First, a thorough understanding of Hughes's legacy and influence on African
American literature is the precondition for the analysis of Hughes's influence on Baraka.
Therefore, my examination begins from Hughes's early life and continues to his mature
period. This part also discusses Walt Whitman's and Carl Sandburg's influences on
Hughes's poetry. I am intent to provide a dynamic perspective on Hughes's literary
development.
Hughes had two prominent contributions to African American literature: his
viewpoints on the function of African American arts, and his statements about African
American music, the blues as well as jazz. Hughes also played a significant role in the
Harlem Renaissance from the 1920s to the 1930s. Inheriting and inspired by Du Bois's
statements on African American identity, Hughes encouraged the young generation of

African American artists to promote the outstanding African American arts and be proud
of their African American identity.
Jazz is one of the most celebrated African American arts. From Hughes's
perspective, jazz was the best inspiration for his poetry, and in return Hughes made his
poetry the most comfortable habitat for jazz. As one of the forerunners of jazz poetry,
Hughes melted the rhythm and passion of jazz music into his poetic lines. I will present a
close reading of "The Weary Blues," a poem with which Hughes began his reputation as
a jazz poet, so as to analyze the glamour of jazz poetry.
Second, after explaining Hughes's legacy and influence, I will make an analysis
of Hughes's influence on Baraka, especially in terms of African American music and the
function of the arts: I will examine Baraka's literary growth and how his characteristics
and views of life were shaped by the images and personalities of those heroes in the
shows that Baraka listened to through radio in his youth.
Baraka grew up in the Jazz Age, and his life and personality became an
embodiment of the spirit of jazz. In his book Blues People, Baraka systematically and
philosophically analyzed the blues and jazz's tradition as well as its function in African
American people's lives. Furthermore, his love towards music is not confined to jazz; he
likes all modern music. But Baraka still shifted his interest into the roots of African
American music, the blues, in his later life.
Both Hughes and Baraka had a strong sense of social responsibility for the
African American people. They made great efforts to establish a free and democratic
society by advocating African American arts and encouraging African American artists.
Hughes gave up his Christian identity and believed in Marxism in 1931, while Baraka's

thought experienced the Beat and the Transitional periods, the Black Nationalist period,
and the Third World Marxist period four transformations. Hughes did not agree with the
violence and "Nationalism" that Baraka promoted, but both of them changed their
original belief to Marxism. I will compare Hughes's views on African American arts to
that of Baraka, according to different periods of his transformation of thought, and see
how much they have in common in terms of their views of the arts.
Therefore, I will conclude that both Hughes and Baraka are men of letters, men of
music, and men of dreams; they use their letters and music to interpret their common
dream and pursuitto improve African American people's living conditions and social
status.

5
II. LANGSTON HUGHES'S LEGACY AND INFLUENCE
Langston Hughes (1902-67), poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and children's
book author, was one of the most prominent writers during the Harlem Renaissance.
Hughes was bom in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas. He spent
all his life writing and traveling, and left a great legacy, which consequently influenced
many of the African American writers who followed him. Hughes was the first African
American writer who successfully made writing solely a life-long career and made
literature his life (Scrimgeour). His literary works stand as a "Great Pyramid," and as
critic Onwuchekwa Jemie states in Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry,
against them "all other monuments in the Valley of Afro-American Poetry will have to be
measured" (32). In this chapter, I will make an analysis of Hughes's contributions to
African American literature from three perspectives: Hughes's life with literature, W. E.
B. Du Bois's influence as well as the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz poetry.
A. Hughes's Life with Literature
1. Hughes's Early Life
The name of Langston Hughes was often associated with hope, faith, and a
brighter future for his readers. Hughes spent his life-long career of literature in the pursuit
of his dream of freedom and democracy, since he deeply believed in the lines of The
Declaration of Independence, that "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness" (U.S. Constitution 35). However, the troubles and hardships in
Hughes's life had never been as light as he conveys them. Jemie says, "Hughes was a
genius at making light of life's tragedies, his own included" (xxiii). Hughes gently faced

all of the troubles that the waves of the sea of life brought to him, and let down his nets in
his best effort to pull in the precious things that he wanted.
Hughes was bom to learn how to be strong and how to struggle in the sea of life
depending on himself. Hughes's father went to Mexico when Hughes was in his infancy,
and under the pressure of life, his mother always had to move and change jobs.
Therefore, without the love and company of his parents, Hughes spent his childhood with
his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. After the death of his grandmother in 1915,
Hughes began to live with his mother, Carrie Mercer Langston. Because his mother had
been changing jobs, Hughes moved with his mother and started to face the challenges of
life in his teenage years. (Big Sea 13-14)
Hughes had a passion for books since he was a little child. He writes, "It was that
books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the
wonderful world in bookswhere if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language,
not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas" (Big Sea 16). When he was in seventh grade,
Hughes was elected Class Poet because of his "sense of rhythm" (24).
After he went to Central High School in Cleveland, Hughes continued to practice
writing poetry and wrote poems for Belfry Owl, a school magazine. Hughes remembered,
"Little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar's and poems without rhyme like
Sandburg's were the first real poems I tried to write" (Big Sea 28). Hereafter, he began to
send his poems to some big magazines, but unfortunately, they were all rejected. Hughes
spent a very pleasurable and meaningful time in Central High School, where he gained
knowledge, made friends, and became the editor of the school's year book.

Hughes went to Mexico to see his father when he studied in high school, and
spent "the most miserable" summer he had ever known in Mexico (Big Sea 39). To
discuss his further education with his father, Hughes revisited him after graduating from
high school. Hughes's earliest famous poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," was. written
on his way to Mexico, just outside St. Louis, on his second trip. At that time, he felt very
bad, because he went to the station alone and departed from his mother who needed him
and never wished him to leave. While watching the Mississippi river "flowing down
toward the heart of the South," Hughes associated all his knowledge and affections he
had learned before, then he put all of these thoughts in his poem, which begins with these
lines:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. (4, lines 1-4)
Hughes did not like his father, James Nathaniel Hughes. In fact, he had a totally
different personality and outlook from his father's. His father did not like Negroes.
Hughes liked them very much. His father wanted him to be an engineer. Hughes wanted
to be a writer. Hughes recorded one of their conversations in his autobiography:
"What do you want to be?"
"I don't know. But I think a writer."
"A writer?" My father said. "A writer? Do they make any money?"
"Some of them do, I guess."

"I never heard of a colored one that did," said my father.

"Alexandre Dumas," I answered.
"Yes, but he was in Paris, where they don't care about color. That's what I
want you to do, Langston. Learn something you can make a living from
anywhere in the world, in Europe or South America, and don't stay in the
States, where you have to live like a nigger with niggers."
"But I like Negroes," I said. "We have plenty of fun."
"Fun!" my father shouted. "How can you have fun with the color line
staring you in the face? I never could." (Big Sea 61-62)
Because of the uncompromising contradictions and huge differences between
Hughes and his father, both in personality and in thought, Hughes finally decided to
escape from his father's control:
September approached and still I had made no headway with my father
about going to college. He said Europe. I said New York. He said he
wouldn't spend a penny to educate me in the United States. I asked him
how long I had to stay in Mexico. He said until I decided to act wisely.
Not caring what that meant, I made up my mind to see about getting away
myself. (Big Sea 66)
Hughes studied at Columbia University with his father's support, under the
condition that he studied to be an engineer rather than a writer. However, Hughes found
he did not like Columbia, because of the racial prejudice, and more importantly, Hughes
found he could not give up his love of literature or his passion for writing poetry. So,
Hughes was intent to quit Columbia, since he believed that he would never turn out to be

9
what his father expected him to be in return for the amount his father invested. (Big Sea
85) Maybe because the son disappointed his father too much, James Hughes never wrote
to Langston after this, and did not even leave him anything from his extensive property in
his will.
Hughes quit Columbia University in 1922, and after a long time of struggling with
racism, he finally found a job on a boat sailing for Africa in 1923. Hughes's struggle of
the "black in a white world" formally began from this trip (Big Sea 98). When he was
aboard, Hughes took a box of books with him, because he loved books and never lived
without them. However, after he tasted the real life in society, Hughes decided to throw
all the books into the sea, as he writes in his autobiography:
It was like throwing a million bricks out of my heartfor it wasn't only
the books that I wanted to throw away, but everything unpleasant and
miserable out of my past: the memory of my father, the poverty and
uncertainties of my mother's life, the stupidities of color-prejudice, black
in a white world, the fear of not finding a job, the bewilderment of no one
to talk to about things that trouble you, the feeling of always being
controlled by othersby parents, by employers, by some outer necessity
not your own. All those things I wanted to throw away. To be free of. To
escape from. I wanted to be a man on my own, control my own life, and
go my own way. I was twenty-one. So I threw the books in the sea. (98)
Hughes traveled to Africa, then later to Europe. During his travels, Hughes took
various odd jobs, but these jobs merely fed him. Then, he spent another two years in
Washington, which were unhappy as well, "except for poetry and the friends I made

10
through poetry," because Hughes always had to work hard, or otherwise he would die of
hunger (Big Sea 216-17). However, things begin to develop in the opposite direction
when they develop into the extremes. On Christmas in 1925, Hughes received his
"happiest holiday gift," which was a scholarship to Lincoln University, sent by a woman
who liked his poetry (219). He enjoyed his life at Lincoln University where he studied
literature and wrote poetry with other young men who had the same passion for poetry.
After he graduated from Lincoln University in 1929, Hughes moved to New York and
lived in Harlem, the center of African American culture and the arts in New York City,
for the rest of his life. Hughes viewed this place "like a great magnet for the Negro
intellectual, pulling him from everywhere" (240).
Hughes was the first African American writer who made writing solely his lifelong career (Scrimgeour). From Hughes's perspective, writing poetry had already been a
part of his life, not only his hobby, but a way of making a living. As Hughes confesses
his literary aspiration, "I would have to make my own living againso I determined to
make it writing. I did. Shortly poetry became bread; prose, shelter and raiment. Words
turned into songs, plays, scenarios, articles, and stories" (Big Sea 335).
2. Walt Whitman's and Carl Sandburg's Influences on Hughes
Hughes had a passion for books since he was a little child, and he continued his
reading habit wherever he went and whatever he did during the rest of his life. Many
writers had influenced Hughes's writing style as well as his literary career. In this part, I
will introduce two of themWalt Whitman and Carl Sandburg.
Walt Whitman, the author of the poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855), is the
father of free verse and modem poetry in the United States. His own literary achievement

11
manifests his words, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately
as he has absorbed it" (Whitman 2209).
Whitman and Hughes share three main common features in terms of poetry. First,
their poems are written in free verse which frees the poetic lines from the traditionally
strict meter and rhythm. Whitman is the American father of free verse. The poetic lines in
his poems are much longer than in Hughes's, and Hughes's poem structures are relatively
tidier than that of Whitman. Compared to Whitman's poetry, the most outstanding feature
of Hughes's poetry is its jazz characteristic, which sometimes applies the twelve bar
structure of the blues music.
Second, in their poems, both Whitman and Hughes are concerned about reality
and the life of ordinary people. Whitman eulogizes the energy and contribution of the
working class, who are the real constructors of the American nation. It is the working
class's hard work that supports the rapid development of the country. Hughes uses his
poetry to record African American people's lives, their happiness, and for the most part,
their sorrow, which is often expressed by combining the blues and jazz in his poetry.
Third, Whitman and Hughes acknowledge the social function of literature, and
they express their unbending confidence and optimism in their people and their country.
Whitman's poetry demonstrates the flourishing of the country during the second
industrial revolution period, and he holds democracy as his central topic. While Hughes,
through the access of poetry, aims at encouraging African American people and all the
people living in the land of America to realize the dream of having freedom and
democracy in social life without injustice and racial prejudice.

12
Besides these three main features, Whitman also influenced Hughes's poetry
creation in other aspects. For example, inspired by Whitman's lines in "Song of Myself'
(1881) and "I Hear American Singing" (1867), Hughes wrote the poem "I, Too" in 1925.
Although African American people were still suffering unfair treatment and having
limited freedom in reality, Hughes expressed his faith in tomorrow:
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'11 dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then,

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed

I, too, am America. (46, lines 8-18)

Different from Whitman's singing for America's prosperity that he had personally
experienced, "I, Too" expresses Hughes's sense of pride in his identity, his strong
confidence in a better life for the African American people, not right now, but in the very
near future. Hughes's confidence in a better life also becomes his belief, pursuit, and

13
motive for all the things he has decided to do and has been doing, for his people and his
country.
Whitman was also a forerunner who was concerned about African American
people's lives and the issue of racial prejudice in his poetry. He eulogizes Lincoln's
contribution in his famous poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865),
and compares Lincoln to a captain as well as a father in his poem, "Oh, Captain! My
Captain!" (1865). According to Steven C. Tracy in Langston Hughes & the Blues,
Hughes sincerely respected Whitman, and when editing Whitman's poetry selection for
children, Hughes named Whitman in his articles as "Negroes' First Great Poetic Friend"
(qtd. in Tracy 142). Through Whitman's poetry, Hughes appeared to realize that the
ordinary people like the working class of the white people that were called "grass" by
Whitman could also become the subject of his own poetry.
Another important figure, maybe the most important figure, from whom Hughes
directly learned the technique of writing poetry, was Carl Sandburg, Hughes's "guiding
star" (Big Sea 29). If Whitman showed Hughes the theme of freedom of modem poetry,
Sandburg was the one that taught Hughes how to present this freedom in his poetic lines.
Hughes began to study Sandburg's unrhythmed poetry when he was in high school.
Hughes writes as follows:
Ethel Weimer discovered Carl Sandburg for me. Although I had read of
Carl Sandburg beforein an article, I think, in the Kansas City Star about
how bad free verse wasI didn't really know him until Miss Weimer in
second-year English brought him, as well as Amy Lowell, Vachel

14
Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, to us. Then I began to try to write like
Carl Sandburg. (28)
Perhaps, Hughes is the most outstanding "student" that Sandburg has had.
Therefore, the three main common featuresfree verse, writing about ordinary people,
and the optimistic attitude shared by Whitman and Hughes can also be found in
Sandburg's poetry. Whitman's poetry also influenced Sandburg's in terms of free verse
and theme. But one of the greatest advantages that Sandburg possessed over Whitman is
that Sandburg "had an excellent ear for the musical sequence of sounds, the balancing
and counterpointing of phrase against phrase" (Allen 36). This musical characteristic is
one of the most precious things that Hughes inherited from Sandburg.
Even though they are unrhythmed poems, Sandburg's poems are full of sound
effects, which are realized harmoniously; as Gay Wilson Allen writes in his pamphlet,
Carl Sandburg, "Sandburg wrote for both the ear and the eye" (36). Sandburg's famous
poem "Chicago" manifests these characteristics in great detail. In the middle part of the
poem, the poet continually uses six verbs in the forms of present participle to present the
vigor and power of working class:
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding... (3, lines 18-24)

15
The series of verbs in the forms of present participle both strengthens the visual
effect and the musical effect of the poem and lead the readers to the poetic scene of
working. In addition, Sandburg wrote a good number of poems about music and songs.
Sandburg was a Chicago poet, and Chicago has become one of the centers of jazz and
jazz musicians during that time. Therefore, Sandburg also tried to display jazz and the
blues in his poems, like "Jazz Fantasia" (1920), which begins with these lines:
DRUM on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen. (179, lines 1-3)
These three lines describe a group of jazzmen's performance, which has great
similarities with Hughes's "The Weary Blues" (1926), both in structure and in emotion.
The first two lines in each poem depict the performers' performance, with a third line to
introduce the performer:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play. (33, lines 1-3)
The performer is only one pianist in Hughes's poem, rather than a group of jazz
musicians in Sandburg's poem. Sandburg expresses his inspiration aroused by jazz
music, while Hughes steps into the pianist's mind, feels the pianist's feeling, and listens
to the pianist's singing.
From Hughes's viewpoint, the musical enlightenment in Sandburg's poetry is
proved to be invaluable for his own poetry, especially for his jazz poetry. Sandburg
captures the small objects, epiphanies, and moments of life, and invites them into his

16
poetry. Hughes inherits this sensibility. In addition, Sandburg's interest about African
American culture and his socialist identity also influence Hughes's writing.
In addition to those similarities in their poems that I introduced above, Sandburg
and Hughes have similar personalities and similar understandings of life and literature.
Sandburg, in his "Notes for a Preface" for 77ze Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg,
confesses:
All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to
write. At sixty-five I began my first novel, and the five years lacking a
month I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.... If God had
let me live five years longer I should have been a writer, (xxxi)
Hughes is also a seeker searching for the essence of life as well as literature, as he
says, "Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled" (Big Sea vii).
And "Literature is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still
pulling" (335). Both Sandburg and Hughes hold fast to their dreams and appear to
believe, "Those who are credulous about the destiny of man, who believe more than they
can prove of the future of the human race, will make that future, shape that destiny"
(MacLeish xxii).
Hughes's literary career was influenced not only by Whitman and Sandburg, but
by the whole literary and social environment of his time. Arnold Rampersad wonderfully
summarized many of the influences on Hughes' literary career in his book The Life of
Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America. 1902-1941:
He reached this new stage assisted probably by several sources of which
he might have been unconscious: Whitman's few but deft portraits of

17
blacks in Leaves of Grass; Sandburg's crudely powerful evocations of
black music and life, as in his "Jazz Fantasies;" the freedom of form that
both Whitman and Sandburg sanctioned; Dunbar's poetic vignettes of
black life; perhaps Du Bois's essays on Africa and on the black woman,
soon collected in his Darkwater: Voices from Behind the Veil; Claude
McKay's dignified zest. But doubtless behind them all was Hughes's
experience of the previous summer. One result of the strife with his father
was a rapid expansion of Langston's racial sense. (37)
In a word, Hughes's literary career is not influenced by any single person. He
created his literary works inspired by African American people's lives, by African
American literature and tradition, from which he developed his own style through his
exploring of life, as "the black in the white world," in the United States.
B. W. E. B. Du Bois's Influence on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance
1. W. E. B. Du Bois's Influence on Hughes
If Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg instruct Hughes in the way of writing poetry,
W. E. B. Du Bois fuels Hughes's poetry with the pride and the mission of being an
African American writer. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a PhD from
Harvard University. He later became the leader of Civil Rights activities and the head of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois
devoted his intelligence and energy to African American people and his career to solving
the problem of racism.
Du Bois was the founder and editor of NAACP's official journal The Crisis. As a
loudspeaker of spreading African American artists' voices, The Crisis was rooted deeply

18
in Hughes's earliest memory. Hughes expresses his most sincere appreciation for the
extraordinary inspiration from Du Bois's works as well as The Crisis, in the section of
"Tributes" for the book Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois. Hughes states that his earliest
memories of written words are of those of Du Bois and the Bible, and his maternal
grandmother in Kansas read to him as a child from both the Bible and The Crisis. (8)
Hughes held "a tremendous admiration" for Du Bois (Big Sea 93). His signature
poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," first published by The Crisis in 1921, was
dedicated to Du Bois, the engineer of his belief and his pursuitthe happiness of the
African American people. Hughes writes, "Years later, my earliest poems were accepted
for publication by The Crisis under the editorship of Dr. Du Bois. It seems as if, one way
or another, I knew Dr. Du Bois all my life. Through his work, he became a part of my
life" ("Tributes," 8).
The Souls of Black Folk, by Du Bois, was one of the first books that Hughes read.
The book laid the foundation for the subsequent African American culture and civil rights
movements. The critic and historian Saunders Redding highly values The Souls of Black
Folk in his introduction of this book. He remarks that this book "has heralded a new
approach to social reform on the part of the American Negro peoplean approach of
patriotic, non-violent activism which achieved its first success less than a decade ago"
(vii).
In this book, Du Bois convincingly proposes that to struggle for an equal and free
existence, one of the key tasks is to establish and recognize African American people's
self-identity, because, "One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose

19
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (17). Therefore, "to attain selfconscious manhood" and "to merge his double self into a better and truer self are the
challenges for all the African American people (17). Du Bois defines this newly merged
identity as this:
He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the
world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white
Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an
American, without being coursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (17)
Convinced and inspired by Du Bois's argument, Hughes deeply realized the
significance of identity; Hughes consistently works on this issue in the course of his
career, for his own happiness and for the happiness of all the African American people.
His famous essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" continued Du Bois's
discussion on identity. In the essay, Hughes encouraged the young African American
generation to be proud of their identities by advocating African American arts.
After being discovered by The Crisis, Hughes's talent in literature gained him
increasing acknowledgement among African American artists and ordinary people with
the publishing of his works. Hughes wrote many popular essays. One of these essays is
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" which appeared in the June 1926 issue of
The Nation, as David Levering Lewis says in his introduction to The Portable Harlem
Renaissance Reader, this essay "served as manifesto of the breakaway from the arts-andletters party line" (xxxii).

20

2. Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was a
cultural movement from the 1920s to the 1930s. In the Great Migration period after
World War I, a huge African American population moved from the south to the north
searching for work opportunities. Harlem, "as the Negroes moved in white people moved
out, and twenty years later Harlem, with a coloured population of 200,000, had become
the largest Negro community in the world, still rapidly spreading down town" (Lang 8081).
Many African American intellects and artists moved to Harlem during this period.
In order to struggle against racism for a status equal to the white people, they started a
rebirth and began to rebuild African American arts, because "they saw art and letters as a
bridge across the chasm between the races" (Huggins 5).
Hughes is one of the most prominent figures in the Harlem Renaissance, as the
evaluation on Hughes given by The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
states as follows:
Langston Hughes enjoys a special relationship to the Harlem Renaissance
for two reasons above all: he helped to define the spirit of the age, from a
literary point of view, through his brilliant poetry and other writings
during this era, in a career that continued to flourish when most of the
other writers of the movement fell silent; and he also left behind him, in a
section of his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), the finest first-person
account of the renaissance, a treasure-trove of impressions and memories

21
on which virtually all scholars and students of the cultural movement have
depended in their own writings. (1251)
The color of his skin troubled Hughes as much as it troubled other colored people
living in America. As an African American, Hughes tasted the prejudice and
discrimination caused by racism, especially when he was studying at Columbia
University and when he hunted for a job after leaving Columbia. But refusing to live in
the shadow of racism, Hughes felt proud of his identity and optimistically made efforts,
through literature and his love for his people, towards a better and finer life, as he says:
America is a land in transition. And we know it is within our power to
help in its further change toward a finer and better democracy than any
citizen has know [sic] before. The American Negro believes in democracy.
We want to make it real, complete, workable, not only for ourselvesthe
fifteen million dark onesbut for all Americans all over the land. ("My
America," 501)
Nathan Irvin Huggins states in Harlem Renaissance, "A positive self-image
there was cause for onewas considered the best starting point for a better chance" (5).
In "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes criticizes the young African
American artist who feels shame about his identity by saying, "I was sorry the young man
said that ["I want to be a poetnot a Negro poet"], for no great poet has ever been afraid
of being himself (91). Hughes argues that African American artists should display the
arts that represent African American people's lives, for example, the African American
music the blues. They should be proud of their identities, love their people, and present
the best African American arts, so as to "build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we

know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves" (95). Hughes
states as follows:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual
dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we
are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And
ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs colored people are
pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.
(95)
The Harlem Renaissance advanced the spread of the African American culture,
uplifted the spirit of young African American artists, and brought up many outstanding
writers, like Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Charles S. Johnson, Countee Cullen, and
Jessie Redmon Fauset. However, "the gay and sparkling life of the so-called Negro
Renaissance of the '20's," as Hughes says, "was not so gay and sparkling beneath the
surface as it looked" (Big Sea 227). Hughes gradually realized a fundamental truth,
"[M]an does not live by art alone" (Tracy 12).
Although African American arts gained social respect for African American
people, those people who were struggling for basic living conditions were still standing
far away from the superior arts. Hughes had to admit, "The ordinary Negroes hadn't
heard of the Negro Renaissance," and "If they had, it hadn't raised their wages any" (Big
Sea 228). Therefore, Hughes did his best to let his poetry provide access to those ordinary
African American people, especially young people and children. As many scholars point
out, in his poetry collections, Hughes did not choose his best poems but those that were

23

supposed to be the best for ordinary people (Baraka, "Dark Bag," 127; Berry qtd. in
Tracy 6).
Having personally experienced how poetry can change a man's thoughts and life
as a youngster, Hughes wrote many poems for young people and for children. His poetry
collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems is especially composed for young people.
As Effie L. Power remarks in her introduction to this book, "Love of beauty, zest for
adventure, a sense of humor, pride in his own race, and faith in humanity in general"
make Hughes a poet whom young people enjoy to read (xvii). Most of the poems in The
Dream Keeper are short and easy, but are rich in the power of imagination and the beauty
of language. The simplest thing always turns out to be the deepest. Through his clear and
pure words, Hughes illustrated a world of dreams that is as beautiful as the scene of
sunrise in the Great Plains of Kansas. In his poem "Dreams," Hughes heartily encouraged
young people to hold fast to their dreams, as he writes:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow. (7)

24

This poem encouraged me in the same way as it encouraged other young people. I
first read this poem when I was in high school. At that time I knew nothing about
Langston Hughes, but this poem convinced me that Hughes must be a man full of hopes
and dreams. Hughes asked his readers to "holdfast to dreams," because in this busy
world, people too easily follow others' steps and lose themselves in the trifles of life. For
the African American people, it appears that their dreams are much easier defeated by the
disappointing reality of racism. Through this poem Hughes tries to convince all his
readers that life without a dream is not a worthy life, because it becomes "a brokenwinged bird / That cannot fly" or "a barren field / Frozen with snow," and just as the
sentence in the film Shawshank Redemption states, "Get busy living or get busy dying."
In 1931, Hughes began to believe in Marxism. When realizing the beautiful
dreams urgently needed to be carried out, Hughes wrote many poems about his political
idea of revolution, which he viewed as a workable way of directly providing access for
African American people to their dream of freedom and democracy. In the third chapter, I
will explain Hughes's transformation into Marxist artist in detail so as to make an
analysis of Hughes's influence on Baraka in terms of the function of the arts.
C. Hughes and Jazz Poetry
According to The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the name The Blues stems from
the "Blue Devils" in the sixteenth century, which "referred to a fit of melancholy, an
interpretation that persisted and came into popular usage in the mid-nineteenth century,"
and "all blues derive ultimately from the voice, and the use of'vocalized' tone by jazz
musicians in all periods is marked" ("Blues," Entry 1, 122). In essence, the blues is

25
rooted in Black culture and "its most profound expression arising from the condition of
Blacks within a dominant white society" (Entry 2 124).
Hughes had a special affection towards the blues, and he harmonized his poetry
with the blues. Hughes believes that "the Blues and the Spirituals are two great Negro
gifts to American music," and "The Spirituals are escape songs, looking toward heaven,
tomorrow, and God. But the Blues are today songs, here and now, broke and brokenhearted, when you're troubled in mind and don't know what to do, and nobody cares"
("Songs," 159). Hughes first heard the blues at an open air theater on Independence
Avenue, Kansas City, from an orchestra of blind musicians:
I got de Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got de Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died. (Rampersad 16)
Hughes felt, "The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed," and
"the effect on him was one of piercing sadness, as if his deepest loneliness had been
harmonized" (Rampersad 16). This first encounter with jazz impressed Hughes deeply.
Those lyrical lines with their melody rooted in his memory, later weaved into his poetic
lines of "The Weary Blues."
According to Lewis, Hughes "had engineered 'discovery' as a Washington, D. C ,
bellhop by placing dinner and three poems on Vachel Lindsay's hotel table" (xxvii).
James Weldon Johnson read "The Weary Blues" on the Opportunity magazine's award

26
ceremony. The poem was "Langston Hughes's turning-point poem, combining the gift of
a superior artist and the enduring, music-encased spirit of the black migrant" (xxviii).
"The Weary Blues" is very representative of Hughes's jazz poetry. It was known
to the public by winning the first award from the Opportunity magazine in 1925, and was
formally published in 1926. However, Hughes began to write this poem in the summer of
1920, but he never finished it, as he remembered:
I sent several poems to the first contest. And then, as an afterthought, I
sent "The Weary Blues," the poem I had written three winters before up
the Hudson and whose ending I had never been able to get quite right. But
I thought perhaps it was as right now as it would ever be. It was a poem
about a working man who sang the blues all night and then went to bed
and slept like a rock. That was all. And it included the first blues verse I'd
ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when I was a kid.... That was
my lucky poembecause it won the first prize. (Big Sea 215)
In cooperation with jazz musician Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather, Hughes
recorded his jazz poems in "Weary Blues" for MGM in 1958. Hughes read twenty-one
poems in the recording, including "The Weary Blues" and "Life is Fine" (1958). One of
the best ways to appreciate a jazz poem is to listen to the communication of the poetic
lines with those blue musical notes. "The Weary Blues" is the third poem that Hughes
read on the recording:
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway....

He did a lazy sway....

To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues! (33, lines 4-11)
As coffee houses played a crucial role in the popularizing of short novels in
England in the seventeenth century, coffee houses provided a favorable environment for
the development of jazz music and jazz poetry in the same way. A favorite pastime of
Hughes as well as other jazz poets was to sit in the clubs, listen to jazz music, and write
improvisational jazz poetry. Hughes writes as follows:
I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Streetgay
songs," because you had to be gay or die; sad songs, because you couldn't
help being sad sometimes. But gay or sad, you kept on going. Their
songsthose of Seventh Street had the pulse beat of the people who keep
on going. (Big Sea 209)
Hughes believed that people were moved by jazz, not only because of its melody
or rhythm, but "the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul," and its "revolt against
weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom
of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile" ("Negro Artist," 94, 94-95).
Lenox Avenue was a major street in New York City's Harlem area. The poet
appreciated the performance in the center of Harlem by a typical African American piano
player. "The pale dull pallor of an old gas light" in the night naturally prepares a blue
atmosphere for his melody of the weary blues, which also hints at the gloomy social

28

racism of that time. So, the pale is not only the pallor, but also the foundational mood of
the player's emotion. The player "did a lazy sway" both in body and mind to "the tune o'
those Weary Blues." Furthermore, the color contrast of his "ebony hands" and "each
ivory key" reminds audiences of the racial conflict between black and white. While, at
this time those ivory keys are under the "ebony hands ... moan with melody." The poet is
deeply moved by melody of the blues as well as "the revolt against weariness in a white
world" in the notes of the blues ("Negro Artist," 94). He writes as this:
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues! (12-15)
The piano player gradually fuses his own melancholy into the blue notes that he
plays and totally immerses himself in the enjoyment of the union of the two blues. He
plays so well that he makes the "sad raggy tune like a musical fool." But why those blues
are played so sweetly?The blue feeling comes from "a black man's soul."
This is the turning point of the emotional development of the whole poem. Both
the piano player and the poet associate the blues with African Americans' bitter history
and the struggle against their current conditions of existence. How can they not be blue?
The piano player is no longer a mere player, but a real composer of these blue notes, a
real speaker of the sorrow in the heart of the African American people. He is the right one
to play the weary blues, since the blue feelings are "coming from a black man's soul."

Edward E. Waldron also acknowledges the effectiveness of applying the two

sources of blueone from the pianist, the other from the poet, "since in it the reader
receives not only the blues of the singer, but also a look at the creation of this blues from
an outside sourcethe poet. In this way we become totally involved in the creative blues
process" (143). With the "Sweet Blues" changing into "O Blues!," the swallowed pain
could not be joyful anymore:
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on de shelf." (16-21)
Awakened by the melancholy in his soul, the piano player begins to sing his
sorrow with the "old piano moan." The lyrics of the song were composed from typical
African American oral English, such as "Ain't" for "am not," "ma" for "my," and "de"
for "the," which sounds like the player's monologue to his helpless self. The player's
song sings out of the weakness and helplessness of the black people who are facing the
huge troubles in their real lives. They are not able to solve these problems, so they cannot
help but turn away, "put ma troubles on de shelf," and anaesthetize their consciousness in
the "melancholy tone:"
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more
"I got the Weary Blues

And I can't be satisfied.

Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died." (21-28)
The player beats his foot "Thump, thump, thump" against the floor. The longer he
plays, the more sorrow he feels. The weary mood of the piano player becomes stronger
and stronger with the continuing weary blues and cannot be relieved any more. When
combining the melody with the lyrics of the old blues, the piano player associates his own
situation with the sorrowful lives of all the generations of African Americans before. He
falls into despair struck by the sense of common fate with his forefathers. If there is a
little joy and satisfaction at the very beginning when those ivory keys under his "ebony
hands ... moan with melody," now the player has been completely engulfed by the
melancholy, sorrow, weakness, sadness, and despair hiding in the blues.
Since the state of anaesthetization could not stay forever, the player still has to
face those troubles in life, and the realization of this may bring many African Americans
more pain and make them consider suicide. As an African American poet, Hughes
naturally understands the lyrics of the song, just like his brothers or sisters pouring out
their bitterness to him. Then, Hughes begins to imagine what happens after the
performance:
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

31
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead. (29-33)
It is already the deep of night. The performance has ended and the audience has
gone. Even the stars and the moon have already run out of their light and have gone out.
But the darkness of the midnight still pushes the despair upon the player. The lonely,
weary blues echoes in his lonely self once more. He goes to bed and sleeps. He stops
thinking "like a rock," or comes into another happy world without sufferings like "a man
that's dead." At the end of the poem, the poet has already stepped into the player's mind
and fused the player's sorrow as well as his own into his poem. It has already been hard
to tell which one the player is, which one the poet is. And as Cheryl A. Wall states in his
"A Note on 'The Weary Blues,'" "whether the musician achieves catharsis or simply
succumbs to the 'weary blues' remains an open question" (iv).
The poet deeply memorized the player's performance after he heard him playing
the other day on Lenox Avenue. The weary blues echoed through the poet's mind even
longer than in that of the player. Therefore, just like the player speaks out his feeling in
the blue tune, Hughes put all his sorrow aroused by this "Weary Blues" into the poetic
lines time and time again. Then, the audience would remember the first three lines that
have been haunting the poet's mind"Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking
back and forth to a mellow croon, /1 heard a Negro play." (1-3). Wall thinks that the
poem "The Weary Blues" presents a definition of the blues. Through the performance of
the pianist, the poet defines the blues as "a drowsy syncopated tune," "a mellow croon,"
"a moan," and "ultimately, the expression of 'a black man's soul.'" (Wall iii)

32

As Jemie states that "the 'meaning' of black life in America ... is to be found in
black music: in the blues, a philosophy of endurance of the apparently unendurable ('pain
swallowed in smile'); in jazz, subversion of the status quo.... Black music, in short, is a
paradigm of the black experience in America" (11-12). In a way, African American
people live in the melody of the blues, live in their soul. By using the form of folklore,
African American musicians tell their sorrowful lives in the notes of the blues, laughing
to keep from crying.
Jazz is the "reproduction and interpretation of the complexities of life" (Jemie
36). Although jazz as well as the blues originated from the African group culture, it is an
individual experience. Hughes listened to jazz as a way of communication. He says, "You
can start anywhereJazz as Communicationsince it's a circle, and you yourself are the
dot in the middle" ("Jazz as Communication," 492). Hughes takes jazz as "a montage of a
dream deferred," and it is like "A great big dreamyet to comeand always yetto
become ultimately and finally true" (494). The blues is also like many African American
people's dream for democracy and freedom, which seems to come, but will never come
true. Therefore, Hughes questions as follows:
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?

33

Or crust and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe'it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode? ("Harlem [2]," 426)

Hughes clearly knows what would happen if a dream is deferred. African
American people's dream towards democracy and freedom should not be deferred like "a
raisin in the sun," or like "a heavy load." Except believing in their dreams, African
American people need, in a sense, to be encouraged by their dreams and work hard
together to fulfill their dreams.
Poetry should not only be read or enjoyed by artists. It also belongs to ordinary
people. Hughes deeply understands that his African American sisters and brothers who
are suffering in sorrow and despair badly need poetry as an accessible art to rebuild their
dreams and hopes and to refresh their passion and energy, so as to gain courage and
strength, and struggle for a better and finer future. Hughes writes poems for his people.
Through his poetry, Hughes communicates with his people and always tries to persuade
them to hold fast to their dreams.
Hughes is a dream keeper. As an African American writer, Hughes has been
working on fulfilling his dream of establishing African American voice and prominence
in American literature. Hughes is also a benevolent artist who struggles for "a finer and
better democracy," not only for African Americans, but for "all Americans all over the

34

land," because he sincerely loves his people, his land, and his country, America ("My
America," 501).
Hughes's early life on the sea enabled him to interpret his perception of life, as
well as literature. Hughes believes that life is literature, and literature is life. He compares
them to a big sea, as he says, "Life is a big sea full of many fish," and "literature is a big
sea full of many fish," while Hughes would like to be a fisher, saying "I let down my nets
and pulled. I'm still pulling" (Big Sea vii, 335). Then, similarly, Hughes put himself in
the melody and the spirit of the big sea of jazz. He believes that jazz "washes up all kinds
of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat" ("Jazz as
Communication," 493).
As an African American writer, Hughes deeply experiences the pain of racism.
Therefore, the painful struggle of African Americans always becomes the theme of his
literary works. In his big sea of life, Hughes's every attempt, like his every cast of net,
appears to fulfill his missionto find a solution to racism and gain the final freedom and
democracy for African American people.
With the invaluable guide, help, and encouragement of many excellent writers
and sharing friends who love literature, Hughes begins to walk on the road of literature as
he wishes, and he makes himself one of the most outstanding African American writers
by his consistent efforts. In return, Hughes is always in the position to search for
promising young African Americans who need help and encouragement as he did, and
pass them the mission of promoting African American literature and continuing the
struggle for a better and finer world for African American people. Amiri Baraka was
figuratively one of Hughes best students who follow the literary work Hughes begins.

35
III. THE LEGACY AND INFLUENCE OF LANGSTON HUGHES ON AMIRI
BARAKA'S VIEWS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC AND THE FUNCTION OF
THE ARTS
Langston Hughes's works, especially his views on African American music and
the function of the arts as a precious legacy in African American literary history,
continuously influence the writers who follow him. One of these writers is Amiri Baraka.
Baraka was one of the most dynamic writers and one of the most diligent social activists
in the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. Baraka has sustained an important role in
Modem American poetry over the last twenty years. As a music critic, Baraka in his book
Blues People: Negro Music in White America theoretically and philosophically analyzes
the significance of the blues and its relationship to African American people's lives.
Hughes's literary legacy influenced Baraka's views on African American music and the
function of the arts. And Baraka inherited Hughes's legacy and developed his own
theories with the changing of American society and culture. Change marks modem arts.
Change is also the theme of Baraka's dynamic life and literary works. Baraka's thought
experienced four transformations: the Beat period, the Transitional periods, the Black
Nationalist period, and the Third World Marxist period. In this chapter, after analyzing
Baraka's life with literature and Hughes's influence on Baraka's views of African
American music, I will compare Baraka's views on the function of African American arts
with those of Hughes from three anglesBaraka in the Beat and the Transitional periods,
in the Black Nationalist period, and in the Third World Marxist period.

36
A. Baraka's Life with Literature
1. Baraka's Early Life
When Hughes worked ten to twelve hours a day and completed at least one article
or story a week, published his first collection of stories 77*e Ways of White Folks, and
borrowed money to travel to Mexico upon his father's death in 1934, an uneasy African
American boy named LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, was
bom in Newark, New Jersey.
Newark is the largest city in the state of New Jersey. The book Rebellion in
Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response recorded some data that was announced
in January, 1967, before the occurrence of the Newark Rebellion in July of the same year:
Newark has the nation's highest percentage of bad housing, the most
crime per 100,000 people, the heaviest per capita tax burden, the highest
rates of venereal disease, maternal mortality and new cases of
tuberculosis. The city is listed second in infant mortality, second in birth
rate, seventh in the absolute number of drug addicts. Its unemployment
rate, more than 15 per cent in the Negro community, has even persistently
high enough to qualify Newark as one of the five cities to get special
assistance under the Economic Development Act. (qtd. in Hayden 5-6)
Baraka was born in a middle-class family. Theodore R. Hudson in his book, From
LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, states that Baraka's parents Coyt
Leverette Jones and Anna Lois valued Baraka's (LeRoi's) education very much; they
"became aware that in LeRoi they had an unusual child, and they did everything they
could to develop his gifts" (8). According to Hudson, one of Baraka's gifts was making

37

political speeches, as was proved by his later political speeches and his political speechlike poetry that he created, especially during the Black Arts Movement.
Like Hughes, Baraka spent most of his childhood with his beloved grandmother.
In his Autobiography, Baraka says, "My grandmother was my heart and soul. She carried
sunshine around with her, almost in her smile" (15). Baraka read his first books,
Targeteer comics, when he was sick in kindergarten, and from that experience he
"learned to read away from school" (10).
Baraka's grandmother worked in affluent white people's houses. Therefore, she
had the chance to bring some books she received from those people to her grandchildren.
These gifts greatly encouraged Baraka's passion for reading books and fueled his
eagerness for knowing the unknown world. He remembers as this:
when she'd come back ... she'd have a bundle of goodies. Clothes, books,
I got the collected works of Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and random
books of the Pooh bear, Sherlock Holmes, and even an almost whole set of
Rudyard Kipling, if you can get to that! (Autobiography 16)
Baraka deeply loved his grandmother, as he says, "I loved my grandmother so
much because she was Good," and "Her spirit is always with us as a part of our own
personalities (I hope).... She'd tell me when I was doing something she approved of,
'Practice makes perfect!'" (Autobiography 16). Baraka's grandmother died a few weeks
before the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), Baraka's
first book published by a mainstream publisher. He felt regretful, and said, "I always
regretted that she never got to see a book of mine.... And I wanted her to see that all the

38

dreams and words she'd known me by had some reality, but it was too late. She'd already
gone" (17).
When reflecting on his childhood, Baraka remarks, "Growing up was a maze of
light and darkness. I have never fully understood the purpose of childhood"
(Autobiography 1). Childhood," for Baraka, "is like a mist in so many ways. A mist in
which a you is moving to become another you" (18). Baraka's uneasy and rebellious
personality marked his childhood. Although he was an excellent student and graduated
from high school with a scholarship to Rutgers University, Baraka never really liked to or
wanted to study in school at that time. The playground meant much more to Baraka than
the classroom:
School was classes and faces and teachers. And sometimes trouble. School
was as much the playground as the classroom. For me, it was more the
playground than the classroom. One grew, one had major confrontations
with real life, in the playground, only rarely in the classroom. (9)
Baraka believes, "What the school says you learned and were responsible for is
way off far away from what you came away with in a practical sense" (Autobiography
18). Baraka faced more serious racism and contradictions in Newark than Hughes in
Kansas. However, "Fighting, avoiding fights, observing fights, knowing when and when
not to fight," as Baraka stated, "were all part of our pen-air playground-street side
education" (Autobiography 24). At age twelve, Baraka had witnessed one of his African
American classmates being shot by two white boys. From the experiences like that,
Baraka personally learned that all the troubles, fights, and deaths were caused by racial
discrimination between the black and the white.

Another of Baraka's favorite places of learning, besides the school's playground,

was American radio during its Golden Age. With the rapid economic development after
World War I, the radio gradually became the most popular and the most effective media
to broadcast American popular culture. The years from the early 1920s to the 1950s,
which began with the end of World War I and ended with the emergence of recording
tape and television, was the golden age of American radio. Its various kinds of shows and
programs have influenced a whole generation of American people (Maltin 292).
Some radio shows dramatically influenced Baraka's personality and later became
an important source of inspiration for his literary works. Baraka remarks, "The radio I've
told over and again was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my
young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed"
(Autobiography 20). Baraka put his memory and affection towards the radio in his poem
"In Memory of Radio" (1961). The poem is composed of many radio characters, such as
The Shadow's hero Lamont Cranston, The Lone Ranger show, and the Let's Pretend
show. "In Memory of Radio" begins as this:
Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only Jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)

What can I say?

It is better to have loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms? (15, lines 1-7)

40
To think deeply and intellectually is the habit of Baraka. According to Lloyd W.
Brown's analysis in his book Amiri Baraka, the poem "In Memory of Radio" is "a study
in contrasts, parodying the culture's conventional antithesis between reason and feeling,
between a limited mathematical rationalism and emotional involvement" (110). Baraka's
deeply loved radio age has already passed. From my perspective, Baraka's love for the
radio that he listened to all of his young life is the most prominent theme of this poem.
The heroes' heroic deeds that Baraka learned from the radio significantly
influenced his childhood and shaped his personality, as Baraka remarks in his
Autobiography:
I heard heroes and saw them in my mind and imagined what evil was and
cheered at its destruction.... They taught us that evil needed to be
destroyed. I saw it every weekend. I heard it on almost every radio show I
listened to. That evil needed to be destroyed" (21).
To destroy that evil became Baraka's motto of life. Baraka's literary works as
well as his social activities seems to be the reflection of his heroic personality inheriting
from those heroes and his determination of destroy all the evils. Baraka always believed
in his motto until he "was later to find out, [to destroy evils] can get you killed!" in the
Newark Rebellion in 1967 (Autobiography 21).
Baraka regarded The Shadow as "one of the two most meaningful" shows
(Autobiography 20). His father even took him to Radio City to see the actors perform the
show live. '"The Power to Cloud Men's Minds So That They Cannot See Him,'" he says,
"That seemed deep. Or 'The Weed of Crime Bears Bitter Fruit!' Wow. Or the laugh. 'Eh-

41
eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh ... The Shadow Knows' was deep" (20). The figure of The Shadow
also appears in his poem "In Memory of Radio":
What was it he used to say (after the transformation, when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn't throw stones?) "Heh, heh, heh,
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."
(15, lines 21-23)
Another popular show during that time was The Lone Ranger. The story depicts a
Texas Ranger with a black mask who aims to make the wrongs right, and bring the unjust
to justice wherever he goes. This image of a cowboy hero has become one of the icons of
American popular culture. The Lone Ranger often appears in Baraka's literary works.
Baraka wrote a play called What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means
of Production (1979), and in his poem "Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come
Today" (1961), Baraka also cites The Lone Ranger as this:
O, God ... I must have a belt that glows green
in the dark. Where is my Captain Midnight decoder??
I can't understand what Superman is saying!
THERE MUST BE A LONE RANGER!!! (19-20)
Brown thinks that the "white superman the Lone Ranger is linked here with the
traditional victims of white humiliation. His personality is defined in relation to the
nonwhite's humiliation. The trampled black mask (the black American) is crucial to the
Lone Ranger's identity" (113). However, the black mask may not necessarily connect to
black Americans. This kind of black mask can also be found on other heroes in American
culture as well as other cultures, for instance, the knights with black dress and black

42

masks in the Middle Age and ^#"("Xia Ke"), the chivalrous swordsman wearing the
mask, who spends his life traveling and helps the ordinary in need of help in Chinese
culture.
The black mask is usually acknowledged as the symbol of almighty power and
mystique. It is the identity of a hero who pursues justice and freedom without the
limitation of official laws or the fear of authority, which impressed Baraka and
encouraged his ever-changing personality apparently to fulfill his mission to destroy of
all the evils for African American people in American society over the course of his life.
2. Learning towards a Deep and Intellectual World
Baraka went to Rutgers University on scholarship in 1951, then he transferred to
Howard University, "the capstone of Negro Education," in 1952 (Harris xxxi). Two years
later, he left Howard to serve in the United States Air Force. With his gradual maturation,
Baraka more deeply realized the social reality of racism. His Howard experiences
provided him a part of this lesson. As he puts it:
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the
Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction and how he
would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great
sickness, (qtd. in Hudson 10)
It seems that all the formal and traditional education in the classroom could not
satisfy Baraka's eagerness for learning. He really started to leam after he left college and
joined the Air Force. He states, "I started to appreciate the 'learning' process. And
actually did, then, become attached to that activity. I mean, it was then I fell in love with
learning. But only after I'd come out of school" (Autobiography 9).

43

The cruel reality outside of school drove Baraka to think about what he really
wanted and what he wanted to leam seriously. After leaving the U.S. Air Force, Baraka
determined to learn to be an intellectual man. He remarkes in his Autobiography as this:
The world of Howard University and its brown and yellow fantasy
promise had faded, leaving a terrible frustration and sense of deprivation.
That I had through my own irresponsible acts deprived myself of
something valuable. I thought the sharp and relentless striving to become
intellectual was the answer. (115)
Baraka began writing poetry more seriously and regularly. He tried to write down
his life, as he says, "I was at least trying to put down what I knew or everything I thought
I felt. Straining for big words and deep emotional registration, as abstract as my
understanding of my life" (Autobiography 117).
However, this learning process intensified the struggle of the two identities in
Baraka's mind "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder" (Du Bois 17). Baraka experienced this struggle in his life as
well as in his reading. He writes as follows:
Yet my reading was, in the main, white people. Europeans, AngloAmericans. So that my ascent toward some ideal intellectual pose was at
the same time a trip toward a white-out I couldn't even understand. I was
learning and, at the same time, unlearning. The fasteners to black life
unloose. I was taking words, cramming my face with them. White
people's words. Profound, beautiful, some even correct and important. But

44

that is a tangle of non-self in that for all that. A non-self creation where
you become other than you as you. Where the harnesses of black life are
loosened and you free-float, you think, in the great sunkissed intellectual
waygonesphere. Imbibing, gobbling, stuffing yourself with reflections of
the other. (Autobiography 120)
Baraka's mind presents a contradiction, and this contradiction still exists even
after he changed his perspectives to Marxism in the mid-1970s. One is his American
identity that under the refreshing and reshaping both by the overwhelming American
popular culture and the dramatic changes occurring in every aspect of American society;
the other is his traditional African American identity which he insistently holds as the
more important one. The contradiction of these two identities explains the reason that
Baraka always changes and stmggles in his life and in his literary works. Although in this
contradiction, Baraka still bravely defended his black identity. His poem manifests his
firmness:
When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to
black people. May they pick me apart and take the
useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave
the bitter bullshit rotten white parts
alone. ("Leroy," 134)
Rather than merging the two identities into an integrated one like Hughes, the
serious experiences with racism drove Baraka to stand on one side of the contradiction
as "a Negro," and he insisted on his choice and mission in his whole life. However, this

45
choice was not easy to make. In his Autobiography, Baraka records his stmggle when
reading The New Yorker magazine:
I had been reading one of the carefully put together exercises The New
Yorker publishes constantly as high poetic art, and gradually I could feel
my eyes fill up with tears, and my cheeks were wet and I was crying,
quietly softly but like it was the end of the world.... But I was crying
because I realized that I could never write like that writer. Not that I had
any real desire to, but I knew even if I had had the desire I could not do it.
I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with
what this writer was and what that magazine was that what was in me that
wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my
poetry. (118)
This uncompromised, everlasting contradiction functions in Baraka's mind, but he
firmly defends his identity and keeps doing what he wants to do. He confesses, "I still
wrote the same kinds of deadly abstractions about love, death, tragic isolation. I still went
on reading whatever I could get or find out about" (Autobiography 118). At the same
time, Baraka studies towards a deep and intellectual world:
Writing haughty reviews and deep analyses of what I read. I was aware of
an intellectual worldit had existed all this timepeople were walking
around knowing about it, knowing these various ideas, books, phrases,
histories, relationships, and I didn't. Why hadn't I caught on in school?
That there was an intellectual life that could be pursued. A life of ideas
and, above all, Art? (119)

The process of writing is Baraka's process of searching, learning, and

understanding about this unperfected world. Baraka's writing also records the process of
stmggle in his dynamic life, as Baraka remarks in Home: Social Essays, "one truth
anyone reading these pieces ought to get is the sense of movementthe struggle, in
myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding"
("Home," 9). His poem "The Liar" (1964) demonstrates his stmggle and contradiction as
the following:
Though I am a man
who is loud
on the birth
of his ways. Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even tho
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.
A question I think,
an answer, whatever sits
counting the minutes
till you die.

When they say, "It is Roi

47
who is dead?" I wonder
who will they mean? (113, lines 12-27)
Change and stmggle theme Baraka's dynamic life. He enjoys this changing
because it means another kind of growing. Baraka in his pictures usually looks like an
angry man, full of life, short, and with big eyes. He remarks in his Autobiography,
"Growing has obsessed me, maybe because I reached a certain point and stopped," but
"as a laughing contrast I got these big bulbous eyes" (1). However, towards his life-long
belief and pursuit, Baraka had never stopped his searching and struggling, and his inner
world had never stopped changing and growing.
B. Hughes's Legacy and Influence on Amiri Baraka's Views of African American
Music
Jazz is "one of the most dynamic" types of music (Gleason 222). Jazz scholar Bill
Kirchner quotes cultural historian Gerald Early's words in his introduction to The Oxford
Companion to Jazz: "I think there are only three things that America will be known for
two thousand years from now: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball, the three most
beautifully designed things this country ever produced" (qtd. in Kirchner 3). Dave
Brubeck and his wife lola Bmbeck, in their critical essay, "Jazz Perspective," define the
formation of jazz as this:
Jazz began as the musical expression of a protesting minority. Its tradition
is rooted in the work songs, blues, and spirituals of the American Negro.
In an attempt to retain a cultural identity, the enslaved Negro translated
European music (as he did mores and religion) into an expressive
language of his own. (223)

48

Both Hughes and Baraka lived in the Jazz Age from the 1920s to 1930s, and both
of them enjoyed and were influenced by jazz. When comparing their lives to the rhythm
of jazz music, Hughes's life is like inspiring and encouraging classical jazz, which
generates the permanent energy for African American literature, while Baraka plays his
life like modem jazz, rich in change and strong in rhythm, adapted to each specific period
of social change and distinguished by its glamour of dynamics and vigorousness.
Hughes was one of the forerunners ofjazz poetry. Through his representative jazz
poem "The Weary Blues," Hughes first formally gained the acknowledgement from the
mainstream African American writers. From Hughes's perspective, it appears that jazz is
literature, and jazz is life. Only the complexity of jazz could express the complexity of
African American people's lives by "a number of separate entitiesan emotion, a
technique, a musical form, and a song lyric . . . " (Tracy 59).
Hughes appears to perceive jazz in a more emotional and spiritual way than
Baraka does. In his works, Hughes writes more about his emotional reactions and
experiences of jazz. Hughes describes the blues as "sad funny songstoo sad to be funny
and too funny to be sad," songs "containing all the laughter and pain, hunger and
heartache, search and reality of the contemporary scene," and it "appeals to the ear and
heart of people everywhere" ("Songs," 159, 161).
In the musical recording, "Weary Blues," Mingus's jazz music and Hughes's jazz
poetry communicate, interpret, and combine perfectly with each other. The poem "Life is
Fine" that Hughes reads on the recording is one of the best examples to explain Hughes's
emotion of "too sad to be funny and too funny to be sad." The poem tells a story about

49
the protagonist "I" in the poem, who attempts to commit suicide three times in different
ways, but humorously fails. The following is the first part of the poem:
I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!

I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.

But it was
Cold in that water!
It was cold! (121, lines 1-11)
The water is as cold as the reality, and to die is not easier than to live. The "I" in
the poem stmggles in the water, "came up once and hollered!" and "came up twice and
cried!" At last the "I" gives up his idea of committing suicide in the river, because "it was
I Cold in that water! I It was cold!" If the water had not been that cold, the "I" "might've
sunk and died." Readers can feel a strong sense of black humor in this part, especially
when listening to the funny background music in the record. The "I" cannot control his
life even to the point of death. Life is hard to live, but death is also harder to reach.
Therefore, the "I" cannot simply turn to death for help in this bundle of troubles.

50

Mingus's jazz music in the record dramatically strengthens the funny-sad effect of
Hughes's poetry. Hughes appears to feel jazz like a heartbeat, "its heartbeat is yours. You
will tell me about its perspectives when you get ready" ("Jazz as Communication," 494).
And he describes the basis of the blues as, "You're never too young to know how bad it
is to love and not have love come back to you" (493). Hughes understands jazz by his
personal experiences of sadness and pleasure, and believes "jazz is only what you
yourself get out of i f (494). He quotes Louis Armstrong's words to define jazz"Lady,
if you have to ask what it is, you'll never know" (qtd. in Hughes 494).
Baraka has the same passion for music as Hughes. In his Autobiography, Baraka
states the following:
Music is both an emotional experience and a philosophical one. It is also
an aesthetic experience and the history of my moving from one music to
another, the history of being drawn most directly to one music or another,
in another kind of path and direction in my life. (48)
The blues, as Baraka says, "is the basic pulse and song, the fundamental
description and reaction," and he continues, "A slave's music, a peasant's music, a
worker's music, the music of a people, a whole nation, expressing that nation's psyche,
its 'common psychological development'" (Autobiography 55). When distinguishing the
blues from jazz, Baraka agrees with Hughes's simile, as he puts it:
Jazz, as Langston says, is the child, the blue/black prodigy of the earth
mother / father, that wants to take its inherited sensitivity (could etch a
blue outline of hope against a gray sky made reddish by fire and blood)

51
and presume to claim (to know and understand) all that exists in America
black brown red yellow or white. (55)
As a music critic, Baraka makes an analysis of the blues together with jazz's
significance to African American arts and to African American people's lives, which
share similar perspectives with Hughes. Both of them appear to believe that the blues is
the most celebrated African American art, and it is the embodiment of African American
people's lives, since the blues is their life philosophy. Besides describing his emotional
experience of the blues, Baraka also takes his "strictly theoretical endeavor," as he puts it
in his book Blues People, into the study of the blues, the greatest representative of
African American arts in American culture (ix).
In Blues People, first, Baraka argues that The Emancipation Proclamation just
frees African American people's bodies as slaves, but does not enable them to become
real citizens of the United States. African Americans get their access to the "citizenship"
by the "path" of their music "through the music that is most closely associated with
them: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz" (ix). Jazz appear to stand for the
new identity of African American people in this new country, and through their music
many African Americans can recognize this country and are recognized by this country,
because, "It is only when you begin to accept the idea that you are part of that country
that you can be said to be a permanent resident" (xii). The blues is a native-American
music. African American people create it by their sad-happy life in the land of America,
as Baraka puts it "blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American
captives" (17).

52
Second, the blues as a crucial part of African American arts is essentially different
from the traditional western arts. Baraka states that the blues functions in African
American people's real lives, while the western arts exist just for the purpose of
appreciation, for the sake of art. Rhythm, one of the most outstanding characteristics of
jazz, according to Baraka, has a significant position in African traditional culture, which
affects every aspect of people's lives whenever it connects with sounds, such as language
and music. In African culture, the strong rhythm in the blues derives from the rhythm of
drumsa means of communication. Thereafter, Baraka believes that rhythm, it appears,
gradually becomes African American people's way of communication and expression of
their blue lives. By comparison, it appears western music exists as a strict '"art"' to
cultivate people's souls, and it emphasizes the musical form of pitch, time, timbre and
vibrato (29).
Third, the blues, as well as some other traditional African arts, is acquired
naturally in people's lives, and it fuses into people's personalities. So, for Africans, the
arts are acquired rather than learned, and the form and regulation that play the most
important roles in western culture are avoided in African tradition. The United States, a
country that newly made its independence from the European tradition, is just trying to
get rid of the same form and regulation. At the same time, as the change of African
American people's lives, the blues as well as jazz undergoes its own development. Since
the blues is a kind of life philosophy, Baraka argues, "Negro music and Negro life in
America were always the result of a reaction to, and an adaptation of, whatever America
Negroes were given or could secure for themselves" (137). Therefore, with its dramatic

53
development and popularity, jazz becomes a classic, and is one of the most celebrated
and everlasting factors in American popular culture.
Bom and raised in the Jazz Age, and educated by American popular culture,
Baraka enjoyed a more favorable experience with jazz than Hughes. Baraka enriched and
developed Hughes's understandings of jazz by constructing his own systematic and
philosophical musical theory in Blues People as well as in his other critical works.
Hughes emphasizes spiritual perception, and he is gifted and skilled in creating the
melody of jazz in his lines of poetry. His jazz poetry is one of the most musical,
enjoyable, and, it appears, the closest to the common essence of jazz and poetry. Even
though Baraka is not famous for writing jazz poetry, he also realizes the same identity of
music and poetry, as he remarks:
I always thought of poetry as the form that most corresponds to music,
consciously so, instinctively so. I always thought this because of the high
concentration on rhythm in verseat least as far as my own understanding
of poetry is concerned. (Benston and Baraka 312)
However, jazz is not Baraka's only favorite music. As a musical critic, Baraka
changes his life with his changing taste in music, from Bebop and avant-garde jazz to Hip
hop and R & B, from the classical African American music to "New Black Music." New
Black Music is always in the process of revolutionary change according to Baraka. He
perceives and appreciates this "New Black Music" in a new way:
This is deep music (all of these are Sonny's compositions). It goes all
through you, makes the circle of excitement and adventure, from earth to
heaven, man in between going both ways, elliptical and perfect as

54
anything. Get to this music, if you can. Get to it, and it will, in turn, get to
you. ("Sonny's Time Now," 179)
Since African American music plays a significant role in African American
people's lives, as an African America writer, Baraka's life is also like the ever-changing
new black music, which is always alive and vigorous, like the beating rhythms in the
desperate melody. "Music is my life," as Baraka remarks in the last part of his
Autobiography, "And I'm still there in that, the music, always, that's me. My heroes and
life path. My story and my song" (314).
C. Hughes's Legacy and Influence on Amiri Baraka's Views of the Function of the
Arts
As I has mentioned earlier, Baraka's thought transforms in four periodsthe Beat
period (1957-62), the Transitional period (1963-65), the Black Nationalist period (196574), and the Third World Marxist period (1974-) (Harris xv). In this part, I will examine
Hughes's influence on Baraka's views of the functions of the arts during different
transformational periods respectively.
1. In the Beat and the Transitional Periods
As Cecil M. Brown puts in his critical essay "Black Literature and LeRoi Jones,"
A literature of a people is not something whose existence is dependent on somebody's
definitions; it exists if the people exist; if there is a people, there is a literature.... For a
people's literature is nothing more than their own repertory of myths, myths being the
manner in which they decide to organize their experience in and about nature. (30)
In this way, African American writers established their own group's literature, a
literature of jazz and the blues, through each moment of their lives, and almost all the

55
African American writers carry out the same mission and take literature as an engine to
improve African American people's social status and to accelerate social change.
Therefore, African American literature distinguished and characterized itself by its
unique style and theme among other literatures in the United States.
From W. E. B. Du Bois to Langston Hughes, then to Amiri Baraka, the influential
African American writers have highly valued the function of the arts in social and
political lives, which in turn encourages them to make greater endeavors in their own
literary careers, since "For the whites, art was the means to change society before they
would accept it. For the blacks, art was the means to change society in order to be
accepted into it" (Lewis xxiii).
As one of the most influential works of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes's essay
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," inherits and develops Du Bois's perspective
of self identity in The Souls of Black Folk. Hughes encourages the young generation of
African American artists to treasure their own African American identity then to build "a
better and tmer self," by advocating and creating the best African American arts (Du Bois
17).
Baraka belongs to the young generation that Hughes had helped and encouraged.
Hughes's early poems, such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Dream Variation,"
are ones that Baraka has always liked. ("Dark Dog," 126) Hughes first recognized
Baraka's literary talent, according to Baraka's remark in an interview. Baraka confessed,
Hughes "sent me a letter and said that he liked some poems that he saw of mine, invited
me up for coffee. I knew him, but I had never met him before" (Sollors, 252).

56
Baraka's literary versatility is not inferior to that of Hughes; both of them are
productive poets, essayists, dramatists, and novelists. And both of them are, first of all,
acknowledged as outstanding poets. Hughes's first poem is "The Negro Speaks of
Rivers," while Baraka's first book is his poetry collection Preface to a Twenty Volume
Suicide Note (1961). Philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin says that "man
communicates his own mental being in his language" (317). Both Hughes and Baraka
take poetry, the oldest and the most natural human expression of emotion and thought, as
an important way to stimulate their own mental growth. Baraka likes poetry, as he writes:
MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light and weight-less as
a sail?? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.) I CAN BE ANYTHING I
CAN. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all
the garbage of our lives.... I must be completely free to do just what I
want... ("How You Sound??" 16)
From Baraka's perspective, poetry is a more important personal endeavor. He
states in "Gatsby's Theory of Aesthetics" (1964):
I write poetry only to enlist the poetic consistently as apt description of my
life. I write poetry only in order to feel, and that, finally, sensually, all the
terms of my life. I write poetry to investigate my self, and my meaning
and meanings. (41)
Even though Baraka also displayed his gift and interest in drama and his literary
achievement is more recognized through his dramas written during the 1960s and 1970s,
poetry still exists as an important component of his works. Baraka returned to the genre

of poetry in his later literary career, and published poetry collections Funk Lore: New
Poems (1984-1995) (1996) and Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems (2004).
During his first three transformational periods, rather than make more personal
and emotional expressions in poetry, Baraka prefers the genre of drama, "since drama is
peculiarly suited to his activist perception of art as both image and political action"
(Brown Lloyd 134). He created several influential dramas including Dutchman (1964),
The Baptism (1967), The Toilet (1967), and Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969). His
drama Dutchman won the Obie Award (1964), an annual award for excellence in off-off
Broadway theater. Baraka believes drama is a more effective way to influence people's
thoughts and to promote social change in his essay "The Revolution of Theatre," and he
thinks, "The Revolutionary Theatre should force change; it should be change" (210).
Hughes also believes that the role of African American writers as well as Arts is to
represent.
During this period, Baraka went through great change. His travel to Cuba in 1960
is called the most significant event that contributed to his change. In 1960, Baraka
traveled with eleven other writers to Cuba for literary inspiration. In Cuba he personally
experienced and witnessed how Cuban people changed their lives and changed the
society by revolution, which indeed shocked Baraka, since he had never been educated to
believe revolution could be possible and could really happen. Baraka wrote it in his essay
"Cuba Libre," "the idea of 'a revolution' had been foreign to me. It was one of those
inconceivably "romantic" and/or hopeless ideas that we Norteamericanos have been
taught since public school to hold up to the cold light of'reason'" (61). He continues,
"Something not inextricable bound up in a lie. Something not part of liberal stupidity or

58
the actual filth of vested interest. There is none. It's much too late. We are an old people
already. Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotting
carcass" (61-62).
This visit to Cuba taught Baraka a vivid lesson about how liberation and
revolution could be achieved merely by the force of ordinary people, and it scattered the
seed of revolution in his thought. After returning to the U.S., Baraka began to think about
applying the successful experience of revolution in his own country. He clearly realized
that revolution could be a possible and workable way to gain a new life of freedom and
democracy for African American people. Many of his literary works, such as Preface to a
Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Blues People and Dutchman, were created under the
influence of his Cuba trip, and later these works played significant roles in the Black Arts
Movement.
Hughes's views on African American arts had great influence on Baraka.
Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," the declaration of the Harlem
Renaissance, entmsted the young generation of African American artists with the mission
of promoting African American identity and stmggling against racism by advocating the
best African American Arts. Baraka inherited and continued this mission, especially after
he traveled to Cuba. Furthermore, Baraka tried to find a practical way to realize African
American people's dreams. That is revolution.
2. In the Black Nationalist Period
Black Nationalism is a term in American history that introduces "a body of social
thought, attitudes, and actions ranging from the simplest expression of ethnocentrism and
racial solidarity to the comprehensive and sophisticated ideologies of Pan-Negroism or

59
Pan-fricanism," which includes "racial solidarity," "cultural nationalism," "religious
nationalism," and "economic nationalism" (Bracey et al. xxvi). The Black Arts
Movement is one branch of Black Nationalism.
Both Hughes and Baraka strive towards a better and finer life for all African
American people. As Jemie states, "Hughes prefigures the cultural nationalism of the
writers of the 1960s and 70s (xv)," Hughes passed the mission of promoting African
American culture to the artists in the Black Nationalism period. Through his poetry,
Hughes aimed to help African American people to restore their confidence and beliefs,
and he also realized dreams could not be always held without fulfillment.
Baraka realized that the issue of identity that had already been discussed for a
long time should not be discussed anymore, and the dream of freedom and democracy
needed to be carried out immediately. It was the time to make a change. It was the time to
make a revolution. During this period, black nationalists established their own media,
including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and institutions, to advocate Black
Arts. These organizations greatly enriched African American culture and increased the
communications among the cultures of different nations.
Baraka's drama Dutchman won the Obie Award. Hughes highly praises Baraka's
gift in literature, especially in drama. In his essay "The Boy LeRoi." Hughes remarks the
following:
Mr. Jones is currently the white-haired black boy of American poetry.
Talented in other forms of writing as well, particularly theatre, Mr. Jones
might become America's new Eugene O'Neillprovided he does not

60
knock himself out with pure manure. His current offering, "The Toilet," is
full of verbal excrement. (21)
If Hughes chooses politics and social changes as the themes of his literary
creation, Baraka makes his poems, essays, and dramas serve as the media to spread his
political views on social change. Also in 1967, Baraka changed his original name LeRoi
Jones. According to Harris, Baraka changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim
appellation Imamu ("spiritual leader," later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, "prince")
Baraka ("blessed"), as confirmation of his pride in blackness (xxv).
Baraka's life is always in the process of stmggle. He tries every possibility he can
to make the African American people's dreams come true. It appears that like a military
general or a hero, Baraka is always thinking and acting first and is followed by many. In
his poem "Short Speech to My Friends" (1964), Baraka expresses his admiration for
George Armstrong Custer, a Napoleonic and one of the most tragic heroes in American
military history:
There would be someone
who would understand, for whatever
fancy r6ason. Dead, lying, Roi, as your children
came up, would also rise. As George Armstrong Custer
these 100 years, has never made
a mistake. (74)
Frederic Cushman Newhall depicts Custer as a man with "A pistol in his boot,
jangling spurs on his heels, and a ponderous claymore swinging at his side," and Custer is
"a wild daredevil of a general, and a prince of advance guards" (211-12). After deciding

61
to go for revolution, Baraka aimed to be a man like Custer to fight in the war of racism,
as he wrote in his poem.
Two events directly accelerated Baraka's transformation into one of the leaders of
the Black Arts Movement. One was Baraka's travel to Cuba, as I introduced in the above
section, the other was the death of Malcolm X, an outstanding civil rights leader.
Malcolm X was an African American Muslim minister and a courageous human
rights activist who had been making the effort to straggle against racism and to improve
the African American people's living conditions until he was assassinated in 1965. In his
essay "On Malcolm X," Ossie Davis remarks that there were many disagreements on
Malcolm's deeds, but only one exception:
With one singing exception, they all, every last, black, glory-hugging one
of them, knew that Malcolmwhatever else he was or was notMalcolm
was a man!
White folks do not need anybody to remind them that they are men.
We do! This was his one incontrovertible benefit to his people. (497)
It appears Baraka agreed with Malcolm X's political ideas. He changed his name
in the church where Malcolm X was buried. Baraka thought the legacy of Malcolm X
was his calling for the "Black National Consciousness" ("Legacy of Malcolm," 239).
Therefore, rather than merge his two identitiesone American and one African, into a
tmer one, like Du Bois and Hughes, Baraka encouraged African American people to be
conscious and defend their black race, as he says: "
If you want a new world, Brothers and Sisters, if you want a world where
you can all be beautiful human beings, we must throw down our

differences and come together as black people. And once we have done
this, you know for yourself, there is no force on earth that can harm or
twist us. No devil left in creation to mess up the world. ("Blackhope,"
237)
After he meditated on his travel to Cuba and Malcolm X's death and combined
his meditation with other learning and experiences in reality, Baraka finally clarified the
Black Artist's role. He states the following:
The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destmction of America
as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of
the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by
the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong
through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness; and if
they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be
drenched with the filth of their evil. ("State / ment," 251)
Baraka continued the mission as an African American artist, and he went on the
road of revolution. As Baraka states in his Autobiography, his friends and he were
"feverish and stupefied" upon Malcolm X's death (200). "But in a minute or so," Baraka
continues, "I was gone. A bunch of us, really, had gone, up to Harlem. Seeking
revolution!" (201). To some extent, Baraka went so far that he got lost. Hughes
advocated Black Arts, which aimed at establishing the new identity of the new citizen of
the United States for African American people. However, Baraka endeavored into Black
Arts to arouse African American people's consciousness, so as to be "a nation" of racial
solidarity. The Newark rebellion in 1967 bloody educated Baraka's idea of violent

63
revolution. Baraka became involved in this rebellion against racism and was arrested by
the police, but luckily, he was released through the help of French philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre and poet Allen Ginsberg ("On 40 anniversary"). He witnessed how the rebellion
was repressed by government and how the people in the rebellion were killed. When
reflecting on his revolutionary road in his Autobiography, Baraka confesses as this:
Our deepest feelings were correct, but we had no knowledge of the
realities of revolution, not even the realities of the Black Liberation
Movement. But still, helter-skelter, twisting and turning, we were putting
out the seeds for a Black Arts Movement and the bit of that which we
perceived astonished us. (199)
Facing the upcoming revolution, Baraka must have felt himself as brave and
courageous as those heroes in the radio shows that he had listened to during his youth.
However, after the revolution he realized that "I heard it on almost every radio show I
listened to. That evil needed to be destroyed.... (And this, I was later to find out, can get
you killed!)" (Autobiography 21). When evaluating Baraka as well as the Black Arts
Movement, Harris remarks the following:
In essence, Baraka and the Black Arts Movement have had a profound and
lasting philosophical and aesthetic impact on all postintegrationist black
art; they have turned black art from other-directed to ethnically centered.
Thus the contemporary Afro-American artist writes out of his or her own
culture and, moreover, is self-consciously an Afro-American, (xvii)

3. In the Third World Marxist Period

Both Hughes and Baraka turned to Marxism with their increasing study of this
new ideology, and they expressed their beliefs in terms of international socialism in their
literary works. Hughes visited Cuba in 1931 and visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and
stayed for six months. During that time he wrote and published several revolutionary
poems, like "Goodbye Christ" (1932), and "Good Morning Revolution" (1932) and
Hughes's thought finally turned to Marxism. Baraka traveled to Cuba in 1960, where he
first encountered revolution, and he formally declared his Marxist identity in 1974. Both
Hughes and Baraka gave up their original religious beliefs and then passed on the
message of revolution to people in their poetry. They appeared to believe that revolution
was the most effective way to solve America's deep-rooted racial and social problems.
Hughes's Marxist consciousness, worship of revolution, and distrust of religion
were featured in his later works. With the transformation of his thought, Hughes's
concern is not only with the happiness of the African American people, but all the
people's freedom and democracy in the land of the United States. After the end of the
Harlem Renaissance, Hughes expressed his reflection on political solutions to racism and
wrote many poems about revolution. Encouraged by the third world people's successful
revolution, Hughes finally chose the road of revolution to change America's reality.
Hughes's poem "Good Morning Revolution" is one of his best revolution poems. The
poem starts with Hughes's greeting to revolution:
Good morning Revolution:
You are the best friend
I ever had.

65
We gonna pal around together from now on.
Say, listen, Revolution:
You know the boss where I used to work,
The guy that gimme the air to cut down expenses,
He wrote a long letter to the papers about you:
Said you was a trouble maker, a alien-enemy,
In other words a son-of-a-bitch.
He called up the police
And told'em to watch out for a guy
Named Revolution

Boy! Them radios

Broadcasting that very first morning to USSR:
Another member of the International Soviet's done come
Greetings to the Socialist Soviet Republics
Hey you rising workers everywhere greetings
And we'll sign it: Germany
Sign it: China
Sign it: Africa
Sign it: Italy
Sign it: America
Sign it with my one name: Worker

66
On that day when no one will be hungry, cold oppressed,
Anywhere in the world again.

That's our job!

I been starvin' too long

Ain't you?

Let's go, Revolution! (162-63)

During the Third World Marxist period, Baraka continued to believe in
revolution. He paid great attention on the revolution in China, and he liked reading
Chinese writers' political and literary works. Baraka especially liked # ^ ("Lu Xun"),
one of the most outstanding Chinese revolutionists and writers. Baraka said that reading
his short novels was "the most inspiring discovery that I made in the last year (1975)"
(Sollors 247). He appeared to agree with ^ ^ ^ " ( " M a o Zedong"), the Chinese
revolutionary leader and thereafter the first president of the People's Republic of China,
who said that "all art is propaganda. (250)
Baraka has been writing poetry in his life, and his poems have different emphases
and purposes in different periods. In 1975, Baraka published his collection of poems,
Hard Fact, and clarified his Marxist identity. In the introduction, Baraka declares that
"POETRY IS SAYING SOMETHING ABOUT REALITY," and "poetry should be a
weapon of revolutionary straggle" (236, 237). Baraka wrote many revolutionary poems

67
to promote his belief in Marxism and revolution. "When We'll Worship Jesus" is one of
them. The poem begins with Baraka's question on Jesus:
We'll worship Jesus
Whenjesusdo
Somethin

when jesus get down

when jesus get out his yellow Lincoln
w / the built in cross stain glass
window & box w / black peoples
enemies we'll worship jesus when
he get bad enough to at least scare
somebodycops not afraid
of jesus
pushers not afraid
imperialists not afraid
of jesus shit they makin money
off jesus (243)
Baraka clearly realized that belief and hope cannot solve any realistic problems.
By questioning the worship of Jesus, Baraka questioned all those beliefs without realistic
actions. In his poem, Baraka states that it is not the time to worship, because Jesus cannot
solve racism, and worship itself even cannot make those "capitalists" and "imperialists"

68
feel afraid. The only way to change African American people's lives in this country is to
take action and go for revolution, as he writes:
we can change the world
we aint gonna worship jesus cause jesus don't exist
xcept in song and story except in ritual and dance, except in slum
stained
tears or trillion dollar opulence stretching back in history, the history
of the oppression of the human mind
we worship the strength in us
we worship our selves
we worship the light in us
we worship the warmth in us

we worship revolution (245)

Coincidently, Hughes had already written a poem called "Goodbye Christ" in
1931, which dramatically previewed Baraka's "When We'll Worship Jesus" in content or
in the techniques of expression. Even Baraka appeared shocked when he read Hughes's
"Goodbye Christ." Baraka said in an interview, "I was shocked. I found Hughes's Christ
poem after I wrote that poem. Once I saw his poem, I was startled. The problem that I see
is that that is thirty years of actual stmggle, personal struggle. Given a good socialist
education, I would have had that to build on" (Sollors 252). Rather than question, in his
poem Hughes said goodbye to Jesus Christ in this way:

Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon
But that day's gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible
But it's dead now,
The popes and the preachers've
Made too much money from it.
They've sold you to too many

Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME

I said, ME!

Don't be so slow about movin?

The world is mine from now on
And nobody's gonna sell ME

To a king, or a general,
Or a millionaire. (166-67)
Baraka's poetry is not as famous for its blues characteristics as that of Hughes.
However, Baraka's many poems are rich in rhythm and with strong passion for love, for
hate, which sounds like a speech or verbal communication. These poems are also like
modem jazz, developing from the blues, but are full of varieties. Baraka's poems in
1970s emphasize much more of poetry's political function than the personal and
emotional expression. Gifted in making political speeches since he was a child, Baraka
made his poetry a passionate political speech "calling black people" to solidify together,
to make changes, and to go for revolution ("SOS," 105).
Baraka is a figure who is always enshrouded in controversies. Rather than follow
others, Baraka tends to react to reality in a deep, original, and also controversial way, as
he remarks, "Having been bom October 7, my nature was to listen to everybody, to be
sensitive to, and look at, everything" ("Home," 10). He continues, "But my tendency,
body and mind, is to make it. To get there, from anywhere, going wherever, always" (10).
In his Third World Marxist period, Baraka shared much in common with Hughes,
which was demonstrated by their literary works, especially their poetry. Baraka finally
refused the relatively narrow "black nationalism." He joined international socialism with
Hughes to free all the people who were suffering from racism and inequality, and longing
for democracy and freedom. Baraka succeeded Hughes's mission and struggle. He made
his own voice much louder than that of Hughes and all the African American writers
before him. Hughes's and Baraka's lives were played like jazz. Hughes's life is like

71

classical jazz, original, essential, and closer to the root of tradition. Baraka's life is like
modem jazz, strong in rhythm and vigorousness, confidently expressing himself loudly.
. Baraka has been writing poetry and reading his poems in public in the last twenty
years. During this period, Baraka meditated more on African American music, Malcolm
X, and African American people's future in his works Funk Lore: New Poems (19841995) (1996), The Essence of Reparation: Afro-American Self Determination &
Revolutionary Democratic Struggle in the United States of America (2003), and
Somebody Blew up America and Other Poems (2003).
At the same time, Baraka's controversies continue. Baraka was named Poet
Laureate of New Jersey in July 2002, nine months after he wrote the poem "Somebody
Blew up America" about the 9-11 attacks. In this poem, Baraka's political ideas aroused
huge controversy. According to the report by The Weekly Standard on October 10, 2002,
"Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League accused the poet laureate of antiSemitism. And the Democratic governor James McGreevey demanded that Baraka resign
his post" ("Bad Attitude"). "Somebody Blew up America" is a poem that ironically
examines "who" is involved in the 9-11 attacks. Baraka speculates that many people and
organizations, including Israelis, knew of this attack before it happened. He writes the
following:
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion (46)

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get

Bombed

72

Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

to stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away? (49)
Even though Baraka strongly defended his evidence, remarks, and his freedom of
speech, the governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey, finally abolished Baraka's Poet
Laureate title. Baraka is always an open character, which means any conclusion to his
characteristics and his life is too early to be trusted. Kwame Dawes's depiction of Baraka
in the introduction to Somebody Blew up America & Other Poems may be the best and
the closest to the real Baraka:
He is the guy who stands on the playground teasing someone. We watch
him and we find what he is saying funny because we always felt the same
way about the guy he is teasing. So we think, "Hey, this guy is cool, let me
join him." Yet, the moment we open our mouths to start to throw insults,
he turns on us. He changes the game. Or sometimes, he takes it further, as
if he is trying to test us, now, and not the person he is teasing. He goes so
far and we are left bedlamized in the middlenot sure where we stand. We
stand there dumbfounded. We feel betrayed, and he is grinning. We walk
away shaking our heads. This revolutionary figure does not offer us easy
paths to the revolution, (ix-x)

73

IV. CONCLUSION
To seek dreams, truths, and beliefs in language is the eternal theme of literature.
Langston Hughes let down his net in the big sea of life, and Baraka struggles to "make
sense" of his life (Autobiography vi). After examining the literary history and works by
Hughes and Baraka, I conclude that Hughes's jazz poetry as well as his contribution to
promote African American arts had a significant influence on Baraka. The essential
reason for this consistence and inheritance is that both Hughes and Baraka are men of
letters, men of music, and men of dreams. They use their letters and music to interpret
their dreams and to satisfy their instinct eager for life. For many African American
writers, their straggles in reality motivate their pursuits in their literary works. Therefore,
the history of African American literature demonstrates the course of the African
American people's straggle for freedom, equality, and democracy. Just as Hughes
continued the mission and tradition of African American literature, Baraka inherited
Hughes's dream and straggle in the same way.
Both Hughes and Baraka are men of letters. Hughes uses his most beautiful poetic
lines to describe his confidence and optimism in his dream and his love for his country,
as he says, "this is my land America. Naturally, I love it" ("My America," 500). Through
his literary works, Hughes makes his significant contribution to African American
literature, and under the efforts of generations of African American writers, African
American literature has already become an important component of American literature.
At the same time, Hughes as a prominent African American writer also gained himself
much respect in the field of American literature.

74

Rather than build a world of dreams as Hughes did, Baraka aims to realize his
dream through his literary endeavor. Except for those emotional and confessional poems
that reflect on himself and on music, Baraka's other poems are written as loud speakers to
spread his political views. Baraka is an influential writer. He often intellectually and
deeply reacts to the environment before other writers, and his voice is often louder than
others'.
Both Hughes and Baraka are men of music. Hughes enjoyed the blues as well as
jazz. Through the melody of jazz, Hughes got to its essencerhythm and
improvisationwhich is also often the essence of poetry. As a poet, Hughes emotionally
experienced the charm of jazz and poetry, and then he combined them to make one of the
most beautiful jazz poems "The Weary Blues" and passed the moment that he felt to the
audience through his poetry. Hughes also believed that the sad-happy blues, as the best
African American art, was the African American people's philosophy of living.
Based on Hughes's study, Baraka had a deep, intellectual, and theoretical study
on the blues in his book Blues People. From its origin to its adaption to American culture,
Baraka analyzed how the blues, as "Negro music" can survive and dramatically develop
in the white world. Baraka's life is music. It appears he likes the blues as well as all kinds
of new music. With the change of his tastes in music, Baraka tried to "make sense" of the
changes in his life.
Both Hughes and Baraka are men of dreams, and they pursued their dreams
through the path of straggle. Because of the love for his country, Hughes is "vitally
concerned about its mores, its democracy, and its well-being" ("My America," 500). As
an American, especially an African American writer, African American people's

75
happiness becomes Hughes's life-long pursuit. From Hughes's perspective, the key issue
of racism is identity. He encouraged young African American writers to be proud of their
common identity and to achieve the dream of freedom and democracy. In 1931, Hughes
began to express his belief in Marxism and his views on revolution in his works.
Compared to Hughes, Baraka gained his reputation much more by his identity as
an activist rather than as merely a writer, and most of his literary works served social and
political activities. Unlike Hughes, Baraka attempted to arouse African American
people's "black consciousness" so as violently to build a "Black Nation." However, after
realizing the Black Nationalism's narrowness through the reality of revolution, Baraka
declared his Marxist identity in 1974. As an African American, Baraka grew under the
influence of American popular culture. Baraka always straggled for his "black" identity
and against his American identity.
Both Hughes and Baraka had many landmark achievements in the course of
African American literature. Their lives, careers, and pursuits have many similarities. If
African American literature is a collection of jazz music, both Hughes's and Baraka's
lives and works are variations of jazz. Hughes plays his life as well as his literary works
as classical jazz, deep and gentle, like a refuge in the troubles of life, while Baraka
composes his life like modem jazz, dynamic and adaptable, strong with vigorousness and
changes. As ones of the most outstanding African American artists, Hughes and Baraka
together with their shinning literary achievements belong to the best of the African
American arts.

76
NOTE
Amiri Barak published many works in his former name LeRoi Jones. However, in
this thesis as well as in the WORKS CITED, all of Baraka's works are under his later
Muslim name Amiri Baraka.

77
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. "Blackhope." Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow, 1966. 234-37.
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. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963. Print.
. "Cuba Libre." Home: Social Essays. 11-62.
. "A Dark Bag." Home: Social Essays. 121-32.
. The Essence of Reparation: Afro-American Self-Determination & Revolutionary
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. The Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995). Ed. Paul Vangelisti. Los Angeles: Littoral,
1996. Print.
. "Gatsby's Theory of Aesthetics." Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art;
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78

/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995). Ed. Paul Vangelisti. New York: Marsilio, 1995. 1516. Print.
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."The Revolutionary Theatre." Home: Social Essays. 210-15.
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Martin: Nehesi, 2003. 41-50. Print.
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79
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"Blues." Entry 2. 124.
Bracey, John Jr., et al., eds. Black Nationalism in America. New York: BobbsMerrill, 1970. Print.
Brown, Cecil M. "Black Literature and LeRoi Jones." Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Kimberly W. Benston. Englewood
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Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine, 1999. 497-500. Print.
Dawes, Kwame. Introduction. Somebody Blew up America & Other Poems. By Amiri
Baraka. St. Martin: Nehesi, 2003. ix-xxvi. Print.
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80

Hayden, Tom. Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response. New York:
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I, Yan, Han
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Variations of Jazz: The Legacy and Influence of
Langston Hughes on Amiri Baraka's Views of African
American Music and the Function of the Arts
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