Beyond Just the Negros’ Art: Langston Hughes and the Poetic Renewal of Black Musical Tradition

Where do we begin the study of Black music in America? Is there even a beginning to it? As a poet, how does Langston Hughes contribute to its continuance during the Harlem Renaissance? These are some of the questions that shape the trajectory of this research. In it, I set a precedent for African orature in future studies of Black music in America. Essentially, I trace the survival of African orature and Langston Hughes’s role in the sustenance and utility of its style and themes in the early 20th century. Through it, I argue that Hughes’s poetry serves not as an entirely new musical form but as a furtherance of the Negro Spiritual and earlier African oral practices in terms of form, style, and motif.