African-Americans: race, folklore and identity.

From the Middle Passage to the Harlem Renaissance.

The modern slave trade from the European colonies settled in Africa was started by the Portuguese in 1444
and it lasted two centuries. Since then, the western civilization imagined Africa as a stereotyped world where
music was a primitive arrangement of sounds and, for this reason, inferior to the kind of music produced by
the Old World. This idea has deep roots into the soil of the past and it is based on the different conceptual
approaches on music which evolved in Africa and in the “west world” since ancient times.

In VI century A.C. Greece, music was an art which comprised also poetry, dance, medicine and magical
practices and it played an important role in social life. At that time music did not have a written transcription
and it was transmitted orally and played with many instruments (lyre and cithara among others) as
accompaniment for the narration of poems and tales. Centuries later, this strong link between the poetic
expression and music became gradually feeble due to the development of a more academic concept of both
artistic forms. The western esthetic thought was based on the concept of music as the art of transcendence, an
abstract art that did not need any mediation given by words or images and, as Schopenhauer stated,
“independent from the phenomenal world”. As a result, music did not represent the mirror of reality, it did not
have to deal with the social and historical context but only with the sphere of human feelings, delighting and
entertainment.

By contrary, in Africa, music was born as and grew into a strong connection with human activities of everyday
life. For African people music was and still is communication because it expresses the tam-tam, the rhythm of
life and nature itself. The main difference between African and western music is related to the model of
transmission, which in Africa was based on oral tradition: a performer taught by singing and the community
learned by hearing him; whereas in western culture there were musical compositions based on fixed notation.
This allowed the reproduction of music in different times and locations. The aim of Africans was not this exact
reproduction of music since they gave importance to the participation of people in improvising the melodic
ornamentation according to the inspiration of that particular moment. What best characterizes African music
is its collective nature, which is expressed by one of its main features: antiphony. The antiphonal tune was
made by a “call and response” structure, in which a leader sang the main phrase for his community that
answered back. This structure existed also in the European tradition of the psalms, in which a soloist held and
“called” the main phrase, while a chorus sang back repeating that phrase. By contrary, in African practice it
was the response that represented the final creation and the most important part of the tune, while the repetition
of the main theme by the leading performer symbolized the tradition. In this structure the repetition is essential
since it establishes the constant rhythm and allows the improvisation. The method of repetition is fully
connected to the fact that everything in life is cyclic. For Africans, life and art are the same thing; there is not
“l’art pour l’art” for art is not merely esthetical beauty, but it is functional, and it is the expression of African
spirituality.
When Black people were brutally deported to America as slaves through the Middle Passage, they were forced
to assimilate a new culture, a new religion, new habits. Music was the only kind of freedom they could bring
along and the only spiritual expression that kept the connection to their tradition and their ancestors alive.

The present paper aims to focus on the role of Afro-American diverse folklore and tradition in preserving a
system of value and claiming an identity in a dominant society that always subordinated the Black minorities.
This study starts from the first authentical manifestations of Afro-American music expression such as spirituals
and work songs, that molded and transformed in other typical forms namely blues and gospel. The research
also opens up to the wide debate, started at the end of the XIX Century, between radical and moderate
intellectuals about the issues of integration and emancipation, submission and assertion of black identity. The
work goes on investigating the importance of Afro-American folklore within some examples of literary
production, both conceptually and stylistically and highlighting how the recovery of the past, the sense of unity
within diaspora, were necessary for the construction of a better future beyond “the veil” of racial
discrimination.

What Black slaves brought to America was their whole history. The slave ships which crossed the Atlantic
carried not only individuals but primarily a diverse community with a common background of cultural memory
and vocal heritage. Once overcome the terrible passage of inhumanity and landed at the American shore, the
voice of that memory became always louder. It was the voice that came directly from the griots, those ancient
African educators and historians who transmitted orally the history of the ancestors, to make people remember
their roots through the power of storytelling. The memories became the core of Afro-American expression;
they later “guided the rhymes, the rhythms, the raps of Afro-Americans”, as Molefe Keti Asante said in Folk
Poetry in the Storytelling Tradition, adding that “the words provided the listeners social and moral
transformations”1. Thus, the vocal heritage became a way of preserving and celebrating the past and its
meaning. Even when black culture embraced modernity, the dialogue with the past and with those “talkative
ancestors”2 was not interrupted since it was necessary for African-Americans to valorize their folk identity.

Africans’ possibility of retaining their native traditions varied for many reasons, including the fact that slave
owners wanted to replace African cultural origins in order to make slaves more dependent on the dominant
culture and, thus, much more submissive; besides, white owners prohibited any kind of communication
between each slave to another, because they feared that their slaves could secretly plan revolts and escaping
through their language or their drumming. Nevertheless, African slaves managed to preserve their cultural
habits and traditions, “africanizing” the English language with their vernacular words, the Catholic Church
and other aspects of American society. The result was a mixed African-American culture which always had to
make his own way through challenging conditions.

1
Minganti, Franco, Musiche dal Middle Passage: appunti di diario, in Acoma, n. 26, November 2003.
2
Chiriacò, Gianpaolo, “La polvere e le ossa: voce, memoria, corpo e identità nella cultura musicale afroamericana”, in Gli
spazi della musica, 2013.
During the period of slavery, Africans maintained and developed three main kinds of vocal music: work songs,
cries, calls and hollers, and spirituals. Work songs are the earliest African-American songs, since slaves
performed them during labor as accompaniment, motivation and coordination of the movements, and to
express a sense of community. Work songs belonged to African culture long before the slave trade, but their
content and language were adapted to the new context of forced labor in a foreign land. Cries, calls and hollers
were sang all along the fields and they communicated many messages, such as calling people to go back to
work into the field, grabbing the attention of a girl, or simply expressing a variety of feelings. Spirituals are
religious songs which originated from the will of expressing feelings of sorrow and the hope for a better life.
Even though many scholars proposed that black spirituals came from Anglo-American tradition of psalms and
hymns, recent studies confirmed that they had independent origins and that were certainly influenced by
Christian spirituals since African culture and American culture coexisted. An example of this coexistence is
the mixed language of early spirituals:

Kum bay ya, my Lord, kum bay ya;

Kum bay ya, my Lord, kum bay ya;
Kum bay ya, my Lord, kum bay ya,
O Lord, kum bay ya.

Someone's laughing, my Lord, kum bay ya;

Someone's laughing, my Lord, kum bay ya;
Someone's laughing, my Lord, kum bay ya,
O Lord, kum bay ya.

Someone's crying, my Lord, kum bay ya;

Someone's crying, my Lord, kum bay ya;
Someone's crying, my Lord, kum bay ya,
O Lord, kum bay ya.

Someone's praying, my Lord, kum bay ya;

Someone's praying, my Lord, kum bay ya;
Someone's praying, my Lord, kum bay ya,
O Lord, kum bay ya.

Someone's singing, my Lord, kum bay ya;

Someone's singing, my Lord, kum bay ya;
Someone's singing, my Lord, kum bay ya,
O Lord, kum bay ya.

Many versions were attributed to this spiritual and it has disputed origins. However, it is known to be sang in
the Sea Islands of Southeastern United States by West African slaves. The lyrics are based on the repetition of
“kum bay ya”, which is the African expression for “come by here”. The song later gained new popularity
thanks to Pete Seeger, which recorded it in 1958, and Joan Baez during the American folk music revival of the
1960s.

Despite the efforts of their owners, slaves managed to develop their vocal music into a hidden communication
of shared meanings. While the appearance of many lyrics showed payers and exhortations addressed to God,
their true message was linked to the need of escaping and finding freedom. As writer and abolitionist Frederick
Douglass detected, the text of “Sweet Canaan” clearly shows the use of these double-meanings3:

Oh who will come and go with me?

I am bound for the land of Canaan.
I’m bound fairs Canaan’s land to see,
I’m bound for the land of Canaan.

Oh Canaan, sweet Canaan,

I’m bound for the land of Canaan.
Sweet Canaan, ‘tis my happy home;
I am bound for the land of Canaan.

I’ll join with those who’ve gone before,

I am bound for the land of Canaan.
Where sin and sorrow are no more,
I am bound for the land of Canaan.

Spirituals traditionally contains reference to the Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire and their consequent
diaspora. Canaan refers to the present regions of Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. Being “bound for the land of
Canaan” secretly meant heading to the North of United States, since it represented the “Promised Land” and
the possibility to live as free people. The North were also embodied by other terms, such as “Heaven” or
“Lord”:

My brudder sittin' on de tree of life

An' he yearde when Jordan roll
Roll, Jordan, Roll, Jordan, Roll, Jordan, roll!
O march de angel march
O march de angel march

3
Barkley, Elizabeth F., “Crossroads: The Multicultural Roots of America's Popular Music”,
Upper Saddle River, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.
 O my soul arise in Heaven, Lord
For to yearde when Jordan roll.

The Jordan is the river Jewish people crossed to go back to their homeland. For this reason, Afro-Americans
took it as the symbol of freedom. Moreover, it might correspond to the Ohio river or the Mississippi river, both
reaching the North of United States, where slaves aimed to go. In the spiritual Steal Away to Jesus there was
the precise reference to the memorable underground railroad, a secret way from the South to the Northern
States, Canada or Mexico, created by white and black abolitionists to help slaves to escape.

These songs were not truly understood by American society, but rather interpreted as expressions of joy and
devotion. This kind of Uncle Tom stereotype of African-American slaves makes clear how much strong the
racial prejudice was but also how black people took advantage of that prejudice to gain a bit of freedom and
autonomy inside that brutal reality. Their urge of expression was the shield that protected their blackness from
the theories of biological and intellectual inferiority. Even though they were denied artistic justice, as much as
social justice, by the white culture, their creativity enriched the American Continent from the very beginning.
This “gift” given to the New World is brilliantly expressed by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk
(1903):

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought
our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song- soft, stirring melody in an ill-
harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer
the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your
weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit.4

Bounded by hatred and oppression, the slaves stressed their folklore by means of artistic expression to preserve
the continuity of their race. Music, as much as literature, was the mirror of a cultural heritage that was filled
with new expressions and meanings. This is what intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. called “signifying”, that
is the continuing reinterpretation of Afro-American culture that transforms diachronically, acquiring new
forms and meanings due to new circumstances.5 The term “signifying” comes from the legendary character of
Esu, later called The Signifying Monkey, a half-god of Yoruba mythology who mediated between gods and
men by means of tricks. Slaves learned to resist the process of cultural denigration using the power of the new
tongue against the intention of white folks of submitting them with the notion of racial superiority.

Phillis Wheatley was the first Afro-American who published a book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral (1773). Wheatley challenged the prejudice against the lack of an Afro-American written
tradition as a symptom of intellectual inferiority. In a way that did not differ from the strategy of protest
conveyed by spirituals, she used the neoclassical literary models of the dominant culture only to be legitimated

4
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, “The Souls of Black Folk”, Bantam Classics, 2005.
5
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism”, Oxford University
Press, 1988.
as an artist, and to adapt them to her point of view against the contradictions of racism and Christianity. The
issue of legitimation was necessary for black writers at that time to prove the authority of a book, especially
for the slave narratives that came later. Since the end of the XVIII Century, the slaves that managed to reach
freedom started the literary tradition of Autobiography. Olaudah Equiano and his story, The interesting
Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, was one of the
first major examples of this genre. Through the narration of his life as a slave, Equiano criticized strictly the
immorality of slavery and highlighted the necessity of eradicating that cruel institution. Between 1830 and
18656 the genre of Autobiography gained notable success and was supported by groups of abolitionists in
United States and England. It was the time of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of
transcendentalism. The exaltation of the individual within nature and society, the stress on his self-reliance
and identity dominated the literature of these white authors as much as the slave narratives of Frederick
Douglass. He escaped from slavery and reached New York in 1839, where he wrote Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Writing this autobiography was a mean of
asserting his identity as a capable orator and dismissing the doubt of white people around his literary talent.
Douglass considered the process of reading and writing as fundamental for the achievement of freedom. He
added an appendix to his book, in which to proclaim himself not only as an ex-slave but as the author of the
autobiography. Douglass also reflects about spirituals as the most painful expressions of Afro-American
people, stating that:

They would sing words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which nevertheless, were
full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would
do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery than the reading of whole
volumes of philosophy. […] The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is
relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.7

Close to the abolitionist movement of William Lloyd Garrison8, Douglass was the spokesman of his
community. His personal experience was extended to a more general discourse about slavery and other black
people’s failed attempts to run away. He also pointed out that he did not expect his success to encourage the
racial stereotypes of that time, but rather to dismiss them by reporting the brutality of that “peculiar
institution”9. The universality of his thought is clear in an 1881 article titled “The Color Line”. Here Douglass
wrote about the prejudice as a “moral disorder” that “afflicted all nations” and illustrated this “illness” of the
color line:

6
Fabi, Maria Giulia, “America Nera: la cultura afroamericana”, Bussole, 2002.
7
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/spirituals/spirituals_menu.cfm#:~:text=Frederick%20
Douglass%2C%20the%20fugitive%20slave,the%20spirituals%20with%20these%20words%3A&text=The%20songs%20o
f%20the%20slave,is%20relieved%20by%20its%20tears.
8
Ivi, p. 18.
9
Euphemistic term that white southerners used for slavery. The term came into general use in the 1830s when the
abolitionist followers of William Lloyd Garrison began to attack slavery.
 The office of color in the color line is a very plain and subordinate one. It simply advertises the objects
of oppression, insult, and persecution. It is not the maddening liquor, but the black letters on the sign
telling the world where it may be had […] The color is innocent enough, but things with which it is
coupled make it hated. Slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable
conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn.10

The concept of the color line gained fame at the beginning of the XX Century, thanks to W. E. B. Du Bois,
who resumed it repeatedly in his book The Souls of Black Folk. In the second chapter of the book, “Of the
Dawn of Freedom”, Du Bois defined the color line as a global problem of his time: “The relation of the darker
to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” ̶ and yet ̶ “It was a phase
of this problem that caused the Civil War”.11 During the Reconstruction, since 1865 to 1877, many important
amendments were approved by the Constitution: the 13th abolished slavery, the 14th allowed Afro-Americans
the right to citizenship and the 15th confirmed their right to suffrage. Besides, the institution of the Freedmen’s
Bureau gave an important support to the education of ex-slaves. Despite these achievements, free Afro-
Americans did not obtain the actual economic support they needed and continued to work for their previous
owners. Southern anti-abolitionists started violent attacks to black people, by means of segregationist Jim Crow
laws and terroristic assaults by the Ku Klux Klan. Therefore, the years between the end of the XIX Century
and the first two decades of the XX Century, were marked by a massive migration towards the Northern and
the Western states, in search of better life conditions. Again, the diaspora of black people found its unity in the
painful limit of being “an outcast and a stranger” in their own house, cut out from the opportunities of that
huge American world. Du Bois draw from his personal experience the shadow of prejudice and isolation which
obscured his whole community. What Du Bois opposed to the injustice of the color line and the “vast veil”12
of prejudice was knowledge and racial consciousness. He believed that only the education of capable minds
could bring black people to the valorization of their race. He encouraged the improvement of each people’s
talent, from the liberal arts to the manual labor, in order to spread beauty and truth, to shape identities, goals
and ideals and to fight for them. Du Bois also supported the foundation of associations, such as the NAACP13,
universities, and newspapers. In the last chapter of his book, he emphasized the importance of the sorrow songs
as part of a the most authentical African heritage, in which every Afro-American will always recognize himself
and his experience.

As mentioned previously, Afro-American literature and music as well, had to use strategies of signifying, of
indirect protest and hidden communication to be admitted into American dominant culture system. Writers
and performers were aware of the fact that their works had to deal with a double audience: on the one side the
black folks, to whom the tricks were addressed; on the other, there was the white culture and its dominant

10
Douglass, Frederick, “The Color Line” in https://americanliterature.com/author/frederick-douglass/essay/the-color-
line
11
Op. cit., p. 10.
12
Ivi, p. 2.
13
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Europeanized models. It was not possible for black people to make a true self-expression without the vehicle
of the “other world”, the American world. Since the beginning of their experience, Afro-Americans lived in a
binary mood and that was part of what Du Bois called “twoness”:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double- consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity. One ever feels his twoness ̶ an America, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.14

The issue of the double consciousness, which was later recalled by Richard Wright in his 1940 protest novel
“Native Son”, was introduced at the conference of 1897 about racial preservation. Double consciousness was
directly connected to the debate between separatists and integrationists that started in the XIX Century with
W. E. B. Du Bois against Booker T. Washington, and proceeded to the 1960s with important activists of the
Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, respectively promoters of a non-violent protest
and an action based on mass rebellion.

Booker T. Washington was one of the most influent Afro-American leaders. In 1895 he made a notable speech
at the International Exhibition of Atlanta, in Georgia, in front of a mainly white audience. The aim of this
speech was proposing the South an agreement regarding the role and priority of black minorities in American
society: these would refuse to fight for their civil rights and the end of segregation, and would work hard for
their professional and industrial growth in order to produce a strong economic wellness. It was called the
“Atlanta compromise” and it was strongly criticized by other Afro-American leaders for its racial and anti-
separatist rhetoric. A strict opposition to this rhetoric arose from the pages of The Souls of Black Folks. Here
Du Bois described Washington as the “old attitude of adjustment and submission” and his program as a
declaration of the “alleged inferiority of the Negro races”15. Besides, Du Bois insisted on the paradox of
Washington’s propaganda: he aimed to promote Afro-Americans’ good education, self-respect and the
transition of artisans into businessmen, but the lack of the right of suffrage, social equality and teachers coming
from institutions of higher learning, made it impossible for the black races to progress. Migration was their
only hope. In the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois emphasized the importance of the sorrow
songs as part of a the most authentical African heritage, “in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men”.
Black voice was the mirror of Afro-American racial identity and the most authentical form of folklore that
Afro-Americans gave to United States. Du Bois described black voice as “the singular spiritual heritage of the
nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people”. He included the lyrics of these songs and their musical score
at the beginning of each chapter, in a way that was later used as a code of expression by poets of the Harlem
Renaissance. While black literature made use of the dominant culture’s models, such as the novel, music was
considered to be the real essence of the black soul, because it directly descended from the voice of Afro-

14
Op. cit., p. 3.
15
Ivi, p. 37.
American community. Vocal tradition of the pre-Civil War southern rural communities evolved in other forms
of music under the influence of the urban environment and the new condition of black people. After the
emancipation of Afro-Americans and their migration from the southern countryside to the industrialized cities
of the North, black music was influenced by the melting pot of different cultures and acquired new features,
rhythms, instruments. The tradition of works songs, spirituals and field hollers leaded to the development of
the blues, from the solo performances of country and rural blues to the classic blues of the 1920s and 1930s
and modern or contemporary blues, that followed the influence of jazz.

Jazz spread through the Great Migration of the black masses and its cradle was New Orleans. It was a
cosmopolitan, multiethnic and racially tolerant city, where instrumental bands and the encounter between
Creoles of Color and ex-slaves favored the creation of jazz music. The main occupation of early jazz musicians
was playing in the cabarets and the gambling houses of a brothel district called “Storyville”. After the
government order to close the brothels, in 1917, jazz musicians were forced to find work in other cities, like
Chicago and New York. Here, the cultural movement of Harlem Renaissance had become the “black Mecca”
of an Afro-American creativity explosion in poetry, literature, music, and visual art that lasted throughout the
Jazz Age of 1920s and 1930s. These decades were marked by a renewed image of the Afro-American,
expressed in Alain Locke’s introduction to his 1925 anthology titled “The New Negro”:

The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an extenuation for his
shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold himself at par, neither
inflated by sentimental allowances not depreciated by current social discounts. For this, he must know
himself and be known for precisely what he is. […] He resents being regarded a chronic patient for the
sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy.16

What Afro-Americans asserted was their spiritual emancipation from the old conditions and stereotypes
imposed by American society, to a more dynamic phase of opportunities, self-reliance and deep feeling of
race. This was, according to Locke, “an attempt, fairly successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an
offensive position, a handicap into an incentive”.17Harlem Renaissance occurred in a constant dialogue
between the past and new versions of the folk heritage. Again, the valorization of the blackness resulted in the
exaltation of Afro-American folklore. Langston Hughes is one of the most significant poets of this cultural
renaissance. He recalled the concept of music as distinctive and authentical contribution to the Afro-American
culture that Du Bois had pointed out at the beginning of the century. In his essay, “The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain”, he expressed the importance of jazz for his race:

16
Locke, Alain, “The New Negro”, in Within the Circle. An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the
Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press Books, 1994, pp. 25,27.
17
Ivi, p. 28.
 Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in
the Negro soul--the tom-tom of 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.18

Thus, it was not possible to separate jazz, as much as blues, from the social stages of black life.19 This essay
was the manifesto of a new class of intellectuals, which was not ashamed or scared about expressing their true
selves, despite the criticism of white folks or even black folks. Hughes recognized the collective nature of Jazz
and its systematic relation with folklore. Indeed, the main characteristic of this genre, that is improvisation,
came directly from the African musical practices. According to Hughes, Afro-American had to use their
individuality as a weapon against that “racial mountain” of discrimination, communicating with rhythm, irony
and pain, as blues did. Music served as an act of breaking the bonds with the white cultural standards, at a
linguistic, referential and thematic level. It is not surprising that Hughes criticized the stance of another
important writer of that time, Countee Cullen, who declared “I want to be a poet, not a negro poet”. Cullen did
not accepted the fact of being appreciated only for his racial vernacular contents and expressed this feeling in
one of his poems: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”.20According
to Hughes, Cullen’s refuse to recognize his race as an added value, corresponded to admit: “I would like to be
white”. This idea of black roots as a sort of “illness” to be cured, or a spot to be washed, was the subject of
Hughes’s critic:

“This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race
toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization,
and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible”.21

Differently from Cullen, Hughes acknowledged the racial identity of his minority in America as a resource,
rather than a limitation and its vernacular forms as a treasure, rather than a defect. Blues and Jazz were the
children of this diverse minority, and the rite of passage between the man of the village and the man of the
city. Hughes moved away from the American poetry of his time, which was influenced by the European
models, and preferred a practical poetry, stripped of the form, and powerfully conveyed by vocal performances.
In 1926 Hughes combined blues, jazz and life experience in his volume of poems entitled “The Weary Blues”.
It contains one of Hughes’s most popular poem, which has the same name of the volume’s title:

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

18
Hughes, Langston, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, in Within the Circle, p. 58.
19
The sociological study of black music was encouraged in the 1960s by poet and critic LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in
his “Blues People” (1963)
20
Cullen, Countee, “Yet Do I Marvel”, in Color, 1925.
21
Op. cit., p. 55.
 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! 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!

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 the shelf.”

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.”

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

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

The poem opens with the speaker moving towards a black musician in Lenox Avenue, in Harlem. The musician
soon becomes the metaphor of the resilience of African-American society. He is expressing the mournfulness,
the difficulties, the weariness of his life. The chords are an extension of his true soul, which is lonely,
unsatisfied and unhappy. The blues structure is conveyed by the heavy repetition of the phrases “Ain’t got
nobody” and “can’t be satisfied”, which emphasizes his worries, but also the reiteration of the verse “it did a
lazy sway”, which seems to follow the rhythm and pitch of the blues chords. Besides, the free verse and the
irregular rhyme scheme conveys the natural patterns of speech and music. However, the lines that are not lyrics
to the Weary Blues are rhyming couplets: “Down on Lenox Avenue the other night / By the pale dull pallor of
an old gas light”. The image of the musician singing the “weary blues” is a direct opposition to the kind of
parody of black people made by the Minstrels Shows since the end of the XVIII century. While the characters
of those parodies were sorts of happy and naïve clowns, made only for entertainment, Hughes’s singer is a
talented and deep man capable of immense stores of emotion. The melancholic rhythm is also given physically
by the man’s thumping of his feet over and over again, mimicking the act of drumming. The ending lines
represents a sort of catharsis which the black singer manages to achieve through his music: the pain is not
numbed through desperate actions but it is instead translated into a blues moaning that reverberates in his head
even when he is not playing. It demonstrates how blues was firstly a state of mind and then a musical genre.

The echo of the folk music is also present in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, in which Hughes recalls the topic
and the importance of the river from the slave songs:

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.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its
muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Here the Jordan river is replaced by the Euphrates, the Congo and the Nile. The rivers are used as symbols of
African experience in history. Thus, the poem establishes a strong connection between the past and the present,
the man of the XX Century and his memory. Moreover, the river is personified and it can sing (“I heard the
singing of the Mississippi”), emphasizing the sense of belonging and recalling the moaning of the slaves.
Music structure is again conveyed by repetition (“I’ve known rivers”) and free verse. The last verse expresses
race pride in relation to heritage, which is as deep as the rivers, following the perspective of self- determination
embodied by the “New Negro”.

The cyclic nature of black music, as much as black literature and poetry, pushed Afro-American artists to go
always back and forth within cultural history, from the middle passage to the Harlem Renaissance and return.
This is the deep meaning of signifying and the most authentical way of preserving an identity which was
invisible to the white eyes for long time, because it was hidden by the “vast veil” of prejudice. The emancipated
slave, the New Negro, the Black Power, are the results of the Afro-American effort in removing this veil and
expressing freely through his art. In this respect the words of W. E. B. Du Bois still resonates in the ears of
black folks, just like an old blues:

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her
bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in
beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folksong- the rhythmic cry of the slave- stands to-day not
simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born
this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been
persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual
heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.22

22
Op. cit., p. 186.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barkley, Elizabeth F., “Crossroads: The Multicultural Roots of America's Popular Music”,
Upper Saddle River, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.
Chiriacò, Gianpaolo, “La polvere e le ossa: voce, memoria, corpo e identità nella cultura musicale
afroamericana”, in Gli spazi della musica, 2013.
Cullen, Countee, “Yet Do I Marvel”, in Color, 1925.
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, “The Souls of Black Folk”, Bantam Classics, 2005.
Fabi, Maria Giulia, “America Nera: la cultura afroamericana”, Bussole, 2002.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism”, Oxford
University Press, 1988.
Lanati, Barbara, “Langston Hughes. Blues e poesie”, Newton Compton, 1979.
Minganti, Franco, Musiche dal Middle Passage: appunti di diario, in Acoma, n. 26, November 2003.
Mitchell, Angelyn, Within the Circle. An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem
Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press Books, 1994.
Rubeo, Ugo, “L'uomo visibile: la poesia afroamericana del Novecento”, Bulzoni, 1990.
http://www.jazzitalia.net/lezioni/storia/indicestoria2.asp#.Xuk7Q0UzbIU
https://americanliterature.com/author/frederick-douglass/essay/the-color-line