Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance: Materials from Special Collections

Signed photograph of James Weldon Johnson, n.d.

James Weldon Johnson

James Weldon Johnson (1871 - 1938), one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated contributors, had already established himself as a novelist and poet when the movement began attracting national attention in the early 1920s. Jo hnson published his first novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man in 1912. In addition to his literary works, he composed numerous popular songs with his brother, J. Rosamond, including Lift Every Voice and Sing, which came to be k nown as the black national anthem.

In 1930 Johnson published Black Manhattan, a history of New York City, in which he described the jazz scene in Harlem:

Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.

The night-clubs also constitute the stage for a number of crack Negro bands. Duke Ellington's is one of the most famous jazz bands in the country. Fletcher Henderson is another, which, however, generally plays in a downtown club. There are hundreds of musicians and hundreds of performers connected with the night-clubs of Harlem. The waiters, cooks, coat-room girls, doormen and others make up several more hundreds. It has been estimated that there are something like two thousand Negroes e mployed in these clubs.

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen (1903 - 1946) grew up in Harlem and at the age of fifteen won a citywide poetry competition that brought him early recognition. By the time he graduated from New York University in 1925, he had won major literary prizes, published Color, his first book of poetry, and established himself as a nationally known poet. Cullen went on to work as an editor for Opportunity, the literary magazine of the National Urban League, which enabled him to call attention to the poetry of a number of African-American writers.

Cullen, Countee. Color. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1925.

Unlike many of his Harlem contemporaries, whose writing reflected the rhythms of jazz, Cullen’s influences ran more to Keats and Shelley, as is evidenced in this excerpt from “Yet Do I Marvel,” a poem that brought him early and lastin g fame:

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Signed photograph of Langston Hughes, 1935.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) was perhaps the most influential of the young poets to make his mark during the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry first appeared in The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, in 1923. Thr oughout his prolific literary career Hughes wrote poetry, short fiction, novels, essays and plays. He was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writings and speaking engagements.

Harlem’s emerging jazz scene fascinated Hughes and he based his poetry on the rhythms of this new music. In his preface to Montage of a Dream Deferred(1951) Hughes described the influence of African-American musical forms on his poetry:< /p>

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop – this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting chang es, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in tran sition.

One-Way Ticket. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.	Hughes, Langston. “Song for Billie Holiday,” excerpt, in One-Way Ticket. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.	Autograph manuscript of “Motto” by Langston Hughes, n.d.
Autograph letter signed, Langston Hughes to Ina Steele. 12 January 1944.

Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: an autobiography. Philadelphia, London, New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1942.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960) grew up in Eatonville, Florida, and moved to New York in 1925 to study anthropology at Barnard College. That same year, she won awards in Opportunity’s literary contest for a short story and play she submitted. Following her time at Barnard, Hurston did field research documenting African-American folklore, first in Harlem, then in rural Southern communities. Over the course of her career, she published short stories, novels, an auto biography (Dust Tracks on a Road), and scholarly works on folklore. Her literary work combined elements of her research, her life experiences, and her vivid imagination to create distinctive, unorthodox stories. Despite early success, Hurston die d in obscurity. Her work received renewed interest in the late twentieth century and has inspired many modern writers, including Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

In Hurston’s 1923 essay “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” first published in The World Tomorrow (1928), she described her visceral response to jazz music:

In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This or chestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai [spear] above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow, and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not kno w.

Claude McKay

McKay, Claude. Home To Harlem. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1928.

Claude McKay (1890 – 1948) was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States in 1912. Two years later he relocated to New York where he became a frequent contributor to The Liberator, an avant-garde magazine of art and literature. His reputation growing, McKay published his volumes of poetry Spring in New Hampshire in 1920 and Harlem Shadows in 1922, becoming one of the most militant voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His writing, though traditional in form, brought race as a social issue to the forefront and inspired many, including an admiring Langston Hughes. His novel Home to Harlem (1928), the first book by a Harlem writer to reach the bestseller list, brought him lasting fame.