Turnarounds in Langston Hughes’s Poetry: Re-Listening to Four of His Most Performative Poems

ABSTRACT The article “Turnarounds in Langston Hughes’s Poetry: Re-Listening to Four of His Most Performative Poems” offers new analysis of undocumented textual changes in Hughes’s works “Freedom Train,” “Freedom’s Plow,” “Money, Mississippi, Blues,” and “August 19th.” Because each of these published works were also performed, the article examines the alterations made during performance that have escaped due representation on the printed page. This phenomenological approach privileges the heard as much as the seen to suggest all that has been lost as a result of holding sheet music instead of dropping the needle on pressed vinyl.