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The title of this essay is drawn from a section of Langston Hughes's long experimental poem ASK YOUR MAMA: 12 MOODS FORJAZZ, published in 1961 as a stand-alone volume. The entire work is emblematic of Hughes's lifelong engagement with African American music and identity, and their relationships to domestic and international structures of white supremacy, even as the poem's experimentalism eluded the appreciation of critics contemporary and since (Rampersad 343-44). "Blues In Stereo," the fifth section of ASKYOUR MAMA, evokes colonialism in Africa and the slaughter in King Leopold's Congo, and alludes to the ways that black music is misheard if not misappropriated by those who consider themselves the superior of people of African descent.
Indeed, African American music, its beauty, cultural meanings, and creative representations of the people, was absolutely central to Langston Hughes's artistic project. His poetry and fiction return again and again to the figure of the black musician and scenes of music-making; his characters express themselves through traditional songs and song forms, and he pioneered in adapting the twelve-bar blues form to the printed page. He recorded his poetry with jazz bands, most notably with Charles Mingus in 1958 on the album Weary Blues. He helped Lonne Elder III write the fascinating "Scenes in the City" that was the centerpiece of A Modern Ja^n Symposium Of Music And Poetry With Charles Mingus the previous year.1 Hughes is also credited as being the inventor of the gospel musical play, with works such as Black Nativity and Simply Heavenly enjoying great popularity over the years. In addition, he was a librettist for operas by William Grant Still, Kurt Weill, and Jan Meyerowitz.
Scholars have rightly focused much attention on the role music plays in Hughes's literary aesthetics and cultural vision, as well as his ideas about and portrait of the African American musical tradition. He was one of the few intellectuals of his generation to take twentieth-century black music forms - especially blues and jazz seriously, as both enriching aesthetic achievements and definitive expressions of black culture. His celebration of the music and language of working class and poor black people put him at odds with many of his contemporaries who were still searching for some soon-to-come high, refined, Negro art, but it...