This program centers on Langston Hughes and the artistic lineage surrounding his work: the writers who influenced him, the contemporaries who shaped his world, and the composers who have carried his poetry forward in music.

Hughes’s poetic voice began forming early, shaped by both hardship and reading. In his autobiography The Big Sea, he describes a lonely childhood in Kansas and the role books played in his early development:

“When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”

This early immersion in literature shaped Hughes’s commitment to clarity, musicality, and accessible language. Among his formative influences were Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Like Whitman, Hughes would later be recognized as a poet of the vernacular, expanding the American literary canon by centering Black American speech and experience.

At seventeen, Hughes wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers while traveling by train to Mexico to visit his father. Composed in roughly fifteen minutes and first published in The Crisis magazine in 1921, the poem already reflects the historical awareness, rhythmic structure, and direct voice that would define his career.

A major force in bringing Hughes’s poetry into musical settings was Margaret Bonds. Raised in a home where music and literature were deeply connected, Bonds participated in literary salons hosted by her mother in the 1930s, where Hughes and Florence Price were frequent collaborators. These relationships led to a lasting artistic partnership, producing some of the most significant musical interpretations of Hughes’s poetry, including The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Minstrel Man.

By the 1920s, Hughes had settled in Harlem, then a center of Black artistic and intellectual life. After a year in his father’s home, Hughes wrote of his arrival in Harlem; “I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath, and felt happy again.”  It was in this fertile environment that he experimented with local colloquial speech and music as an emblem of Black pride. His contemporaries included Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen, each contributing distinct poetic voices to what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. 

Hughes’s work was particularly shaped by jazz and blues, which he understood as forms of lived expression defined by rhythm, improvisation, and emotional truth. He remained devoted to Harlem, considering it his cultural home base for the rest of his life despite intermittently living abroad and elsewhere in the States.

Hughes’s words have continued to resonate across generations of composers, from early settings by Price and Bonds to later works by Leslie Adams and Rosephanye Powell. 

The program concludes with I, Too and I Dream a World, poems in which Hughes presents explicit visions of racial equality within American life followed by Common Dust by Georgia Douglas Johnson—a reminder that legacy is shaped as much by memory as by voice.

We end with Lift Every Voice and Sing, with text by James Weldon Johnson, a contemporary of both Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and a key figure connecting the generations represented in this program. First performed in 1900, the song predates the Harlem Renaissance while anticipating many of its central ideals, closing the program by moving from individual voice to collective expression