Langston Hughes (in song)

What happens to a dream deferred?                    
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?                    
Or fester like a sore—and then run?                    
Does it stink like rotten meat?                    
Or crust, and sugar over—                    
like a syrupy sweet? 
                   
Maybe it just sags                    
like a heavy load. 
                   
Or does it explode?

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My melody to Hughes' words
x7ex27sc
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150907/langston-hughes-harlem
The poem, as Scott Challener describes, is part of a longer poem called ‘Harlem’ with its roots in the ‘American Dream’ and the fight of African Americans for equal rights within it. 

He adds: 

“The poem’s fame and enduring public life, for instance, owe much to the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway in 1959 and became an overnight success. Hansberry took the title of her play from Hughes’s poem and used it as an epigraph in the playbill… According to W. Jason Miller, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw a performance of A Raisin in the Sun, read “Harlem” in the playbill, and later wrote to Hughes, “I can no longer count the number of times and places … in which I have read your poems…

Hughes had a great ear: the loud, jaunty end rhymes—sun-run, meat-sweet, load-explode—propel the poem forward across lines and sentences that vary in length, rhythm, and stress. At the same time, internal echoes cut across and distort the poem’s emergent patterns: defer reverberates in fester and sugar; syrupy becomes oddly conjoined with maybe and heavy. The poem’s sounds make it possible to hear “the boogie-woogie rumble / of a dream deferred” right down to the phoneme. That first alliterative question, for example, asks readers to listen for the sound the letter d makes—from dream deferred to does and dry all the way to the load and the final “Or does it explode.” Try reading the poem out loud again, this time listening to the sibilant ess sounds as they rise and recede. All of “Harlem” seems to whisper of something else, some fugitive undercurrent, some other answer or meaning, just out of reach.”

The poem then continues to touch all who have a dream deferred, and may connect with the previous poem here, Henley’s O’ Gather Me The Rose, where ‘the dream foregone’ brings the cancerous worm Regret.

What Happens To A Dream Deferred? - Langston Hughes (in song)

Off the coast of Ireland
   As our ship passed by
We saw a line of fishing ships
   Etched against the sky.

Off the coast of England
   As we rode the foam
We saw an Indian merchantman
   Coming home.

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Old melody to Hughes' words
LHughes 2 - 5edb
I began by thinking this was my own melody, but in the back of my mind there sounded something familiar. I tracked it down to the tune described below, which it turns out has been wedded to a variety of different lyrics through the ages, So, now there is one more, with just a smidgen of innocent tinkering.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ash_Grove 
The Ash Grove (Welsh: Llwyn Onn) is a traditional Welsh folk song whose melody has been set to numerous sets of lyrics. The best-known English lyrics were written by Thomas Oliphant in the 19th century.

The first published version of the tune was in 1802 in The Bardic Museum, a book written by the harpist Edward Jones. About four years later a version with words appeared, under the name Llwyn Onn. It tells of a sailor's love for "Gwen of Llwyn". At the end of the song, Gwen dies, and in one version of the piece, the writer talks about him mourning and that she is lying "'neath the shades of the lonely ash grove". The tune might be much older, as a similar air appears in The Beggar's Opera by John Gay (1728), in the song "Cease Your Funning". This was arranged by Beethoven in his Twelve Scottish Songs, WoO 156 No. 5. In 1922, the English folksong collector Frank Kidson claimed that Gay's air derives from the morris dance tune "Constant Billy", which is first known in Playford's Dancing Master (1665).

An English-language version of "The Ash Grove" was published in 1862, in Volume I of Welsh Melodies, with Welsh and English Poetry, compiled by the harpist John Thomas, with Welsh words by John Jones (Talhaiarn) and English words by Thomas Oliphant. The first verse of this version is incorporated into a different interpretation by the English dramatist and translator John Oxenford. John Jones (Talhaiarn) also wrote English lyrics for "The Ash Grove", 'All hail to thee, Cambria', which appeared with his Welsh lyrics in Owain Alaw's Gems of Welsh Melody in 1860: http://hdl.handle.net/10107/4796728

The tune of "The Ash Grove" was used for the Thanksgiving hymn "Let All Things Now Living", composed in 1939 by Katherine K. Davis... It had, however, been in use as a hymn tune long before the 20th century under the title "The Master Hath Come" by Sarah Doudney (1871)…

Early in John Ford's film How Green Was My Valley, adapted from Richard Llewellyn's 1939 novel of the same name, "The Ash Grove" is sung in Welsh by a group of miners…
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Hughes recites his poem:
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/ashley-bryan/seascapes-sailors 
Ashley Bryan (1923–2022) Seascape (from Sail Away), 2015  Collage of cut colored and painted papers with graphite and printed text mounted on a tracing paper overlay  The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of the Ashley Bryan Center; 2021.25:6

Sandy Campbell: In this clip, Hughes interweaves two of his poems, “Seascape” and “Sailor,” with stories from his seafaring days.

Seascape - Langston Hughes  (in song)

We buried him high on a windy hill,  
But his soul went out to sea. 
 I know, for I heard, when all was still, 
His sea-soul say to me:

Put no tombstone at my head, 
 For here I do not make my bed. 
Strew no flowers on my grave,
 I’ve gone back to the wind and wave.  
Do not, do not weep for me, 
For I am happy with my sea.

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My melody to Hughes' words
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https://sites.williams.edu/searchablesealit/h/hughes-langston/
HUGHES, [JAMES MERCER] LANGSTON (1902-1967). Langston Hughes, the prolific African American writer whose work in multiple genres endeared him early in his career to the black American community and later to a broad, international readership, first prepared to set sail in 1922, when he signed on as a messboy aboard the freighter West Hassayampa. Hughes’ romantic vision of exploring the world as a sailor was shattered, however, when he discovered that the rusty ship he had climbed aboard was bound for nowhere. Towed up the Hudson River to Jones Point, where it was moored among a large group of decommissioned World War I freighters, the West Hassayampa merely served as a mother ship and quarters for a crew charged with maintaining the other idle freighters. 

Although Hughes found his first “experience at sea” somewhat embarrassing, life at Jones Point was nevertheless beneficial to his creative processes; he completed numerous poems, and the experience is humorously recaptured in the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940). 

Armed with letters of recommendation from his superiors that testified to his abilities on shipboard, Hughes left Jones Point in 1923 and signed on to the West Hesseltine, bound for Africa. Hughes viewed this departure to sea symbolically: upon leaving the shore, he was also casting off painful memories of his past, such as his experiences with segregation at Columbia University, his many arguments with his father, the poverty of his childhood, and the day-to-day angers generated by racial prejudice. 

He was also leaving behind the romantic world of books, which had sustained him as a youth in lieu of actual experiences at sea. Fittingly, as the West Hesseltine moved past Sandy Hook on the New Jersey shore, Hughes cast overboard the books he had brought on the ship, saving, according to his biographer, only one: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).

Death of an Old Seaman - Langston Hughes (in song)

Oh, silver tree! 
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret 
Six long-headed jazzers play. 
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
 Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree! 
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve’s eyes 
In the first garden 
Just a bit too bold? 
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
 In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree! 
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
 Six long-headed jazzers play.

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My melody to words by Hughes
stuapr411ed
Pic 'on the road to jazzonia' by funemaster at deviantart
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"The cabaret whirls through time and space to the jazz music, which the ‘six long-headed jazzers play’. Their instruments are the shining tree, the forbidden Eden tree, which now summons the ‘silver rivers of the soul’.

"Hughes celebrates this wonder of the age. Here, in the Harlem cabaret, heaven is recalled. Eve returns; Cleopatra is resplendent; the soul flies free."
(apologies, I can't find the source for this quote)
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https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=77618
Hughes’ enormous breakthrough came from the fact that the roots of his poetry were in Black American music, not white European literature. He pushed the vernacular into the mainstream, but it came through his prism altered. His poetry is in the slang, the local, the specific – this is often where the greatest poetry lies. This is how language develops, or at least how poetry develops – to accept more and more voices into it. (Robert Burns did the same thing. He brought the language and dialects he heard around him into literature. Chaucer may be the prime example of this. He helped CREATE the language we speak today, and he did so by amplifying the voices of people on the ground. Local. Barmaids, farmers, drunks, floozies.) Poetry like this is how other people – maybe even those who are resistant – are able to start listening. Or, better yet: HEARING.
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Jazzy: https://soundcloud.com/mike-carlson/jazzonia?si=428eb4053da44f7badede710b8659ef9&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Hip-Hop: https://soundcloud.com/captainthunderpants-2/jazzonia?si=2af495f1da494035899e7240daab4aae&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Spoken: https://soundcloud.com/lejazzetal-records/jazzonia?si=7d9247b148984f748550093c0b539181&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Jazzy: https://soundcloud.com/ken-hatfield-1/jazzonia-from-for-langston?si=befc024b764e412d83524e1a25da8e01&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Jazzonia - Langston Hughes (in song)

When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
Since I come up North de
Whole damn world's turned cold.

I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong.
Yes, I was a good boy,
Never done no wrong.
But this world is weary
An' de road is hard an' long.

I fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind,
Fell in love with
A gal I thought was kind.
She made me lose ma money
An' almost lose ma mind.

Weary, weary,
Weary early in de morn.
Weary, weary,
Early, early in de morn.
I's so weary
I wish I'd never been born.

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My melody to Hughes' words
stuapr11 3-6sc
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https://earlyblues.org/blues-poetry-blues-and-jazz-poetry-of-langston-hughes/
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1st 1902 in Joplin Missouri. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, whose brother John Mercer Langston was the first Black American to be elected to public office. His parents divorced while he was still a small child and his mother took him to Lawrence, Kansas, where she’d grown up, while his father moved to Cuba and then Mexico. Langston and his mother start living in a state of poverty at the home of her mother, Mary Langston.

In 1907, following an attempted reconciliation in Mexico, Langston and his mother return to Lawrence. In the frequent absence of his mother, who was constantly moving around looking for work, he was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her new husband. The family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio, but it was in Lincoln that he started to write poetry. After graduation from Cleveland’s Central High School, he spent a year in Mexico with his father and a year at Columbia University. In fact, his tuition fees at Columbia were paid on the grounds that he studied engineering. After a while he dropped out of the degree course but continued to write poetry...

From 1922 until 1924 he held various jobs to in order feed and clothe himself. During these years he worked as an assistant cook, in a steam laundry and as a busboy. He was also a delivery boy for a florist and worked for a time on a vegetable farm on Staten Island. He was writing all the time and Langston’s father tried to discourage him from pursuing this career in favour of something ‘more practical.’...

Po’ Boy Blues - Langston Hughes  (in song)

I'm gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
Gonna walk to the graveyard
'Hind ma dear friend Cora Lee
Cause when I'm dead some
Body'll have to walk behind me.

I'm goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
Goin' to the po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
When I'm old an' ugly
I'll want to see somebody, too.

The po' house is lonely
An' the grave is cold.
O, the po' house is lonely,
The graveyard grave is cold.
But I'd rather be dead than
To be ugly an' old.

When love is gone what
Can a young gal do?
When love is gone, O,
What can a young gal do?
Keep on a-lovin' me, daddy,
Cause I don't want to be blue.

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My melody to Hughes' words
x2ed
written and recorded leaning on a tree for support and camouflage, close to the river
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https://www.carnegielibrary.org/blues-langston-hughes/
Hughes read widely and deeply, responding to the work of those who came before him and setting the stage for those who would come after. Of the many poets and authors who had an influence on his writing, he cites Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as the most influential. His life and work were enormously influential during the Harlem Renaissance. An artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, the Harlem Renaissance provided varied opportunities for group expression and self-determination for African Americans living in Harlem and beyond. The parallel emergence of jazz and the blues, however, was rejected by many African Americans who considered it low class, secular, and morally disfiguring due to its association with drugs, alcohol, dancing, and other morally “loose” behaviors. Langston Hughes was the only black writer during the Renaissance who became truly taken with jazz; he infused his poetry with the sounds and feeling of the blues–its improvisational nature, syncopated rhythms, and repetitive phrases–creating a powerful challenge to the status quo.
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https://earlyblues.org/blues-poetry-blues-and-jazz-poetry-of-langston-hughes/
It was the music and its consequences in Harlem that still inspired Langston Hughes the most. This next poem [Young Gal’s Blues] is a heart-rending blues that wouldn’t have sounded out of place accompanied by a jazz or blues band back then or even today. In those Harlem days, all the jazz bands played blues and the blues musicians often doubled as jazz players to earn more money...

Hughes is quoted as saying, “My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.”

Young Gal’s Blues - Langston Hughes (in song)

De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air. 
 De railroad bridge’s  
A sad song in de air. 
 Ever time de trains pass  
I wants to go somewhere.

   I went down to de station. 
Ma heart was in ma mouth. 
Went down to da station. 
Heart was in ma mouth.  
Lookin’ for a box car 
To roll me to de South.   

Homesick blues, Lawd, 
 ’S a terrible thing to have.  
Homesick blues is  
A terrible thing to have.  
To keep from cryin’
 I opens my mouth an’ laughs. 

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My melody to Hughes' words
x4
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https://bbkingmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/L.-Hughes-and-the-Blues.pdf
Source: Smithsonian Institution: http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/poetry.aspx

What makes a poem sound pleasing to the ear? A solid rhythm for one thing—something we know a good song also depends on. There are two poetic forms that began as song forms: the ballad stanza of British and American literature and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

A recognizable song structure in popular music is the African American blues stanza. The intention of the lyrics is to express an emotion. The blues rhythm originated in African American field hollers and work songs, and some trace it to centuries-old songs by griots [storytellers] of West Africa...

The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. When he was eleven years old, he heard the blues coming from an orchestra of blind musicians on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. Hughes moved to the
East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York, and 7th Street in Washington, D.C. “I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th Street,” he remembered in his autobiography The Big Sea. Those songs “had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.” The blues stanza allowed Hughes to convey the African American experience in people’s own vernacular language.

The song structure of the blues seems to have originated in the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth century. The term the blues, as in “having the blues,” comes from a centuries-old term for a state of melancholy. Blues lyrics usually tell of some trouble, but often in a comical way...

Langston Hughes’ biographer describes the poet’s early description of the blues in this quote, “The music seemed to cry, but the words somehow laughed...
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Also here by Hughes - The Weary Blues: https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/the-weary-blues-langston-hughes-in-song?si=a4aa9c1cfce048adb1fa83db8de88b49&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Homesick Blues - Langston Hughes (in song)

We should have a land of sun,  
Of gorgeous sun,  
And a land of fragrant water 
Where the twilight is a soft bandanna handkerchief  Of rose and gold,  
And not this land 
Where life is cold.   

We should have a land of trees,  
Of tall thick trees,  
Bowed down with chattering parrots 
Brilliant as the day,  
And not this land where birds are grey.   

Ah, we should have a land of joy,  
Of love and joy and wine and song,  
And not this land where joy is wrong.

Oh, sweet, away!
Ah, my beloved one, away!

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My melody to Hughes' words
stumay31sc
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https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes 
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents, James Nathaniel Hughes and Carrie Langston Hughes, divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Mary Sampson Patterson Leary Langston, who was nearly seventy when Hughes was born, until he was thirteen. He then moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry.
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Other poems here by Hughes:
Homesick Blues - https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/homesick-blues-langston-hughes-in-song?si=0aa48bd5c5e24ffead5eed8fc2a5db66&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
What Happens to a Dream Deferred? - https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/what-happens-to-a-dream-deferred-langston-hughes-in-song?si=23260e3bb75541f7b1f97b54f5f1d588&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Our Land - Langton Hughes (in song)

Bring me all of your dreams,  
You dreamers. 
 Bring me all of your 
 Heart melodies 
That I may wrap them 
 In a blue cloud-cloth 
Away from the too rough fingers 
Of the world. 

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My melody to Hughes' words
p64 8-14sc
From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes.
Dreams - https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/dreams-langston-hughes-in-song?si=761e8412f6864530aa6f67783c5242e8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing 
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Langston often takes the part of another in his poems, and I am wondering who The Dream Keeper is here. In his poem ‘Dreams’, he says ‘Hold fast to your dreams’, while here he says give them to the dream keeper to stay safe from the too rough fingers of the world. The first says stay true to your dreams despite all the knocks you suffer, while this seems to say give me your dreams to avoid the hard knocks. 

Did he change his mind? Is he testing two viewpoints? Or is there some place where the opposites meet? If the Dream Keeper is God or the Poet, the message might be - put your dreams into their safekeeping, so they remain untarnished, unbroken and potent while you fight for them, like, perhaps, the flag that flies high while the battle rages all around it. 

What would this mean in practice? I suppose do not let setbacks destroy your dream. 'Dream' links to 'Heart melodies' - so perhaps connected with love.  If the dream is valid, its day may yet come. In this respect, it relates to Whittier’s Don’t Quit.

The Dream Keeper - Langston Hughes (in song)

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

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My melody to Hughes' words
LH p75 x5sc
Pic - Langston with his mother Carrie
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_to_Son 
"Mother to Son" is a 1922 poem written by Langston Hughes. The poem follows a mother speaking to her son about her life, which she says "ain't been no crystal stair". She first describes the struggles she has faced and then urges him to continue moving forward. It was referenced by Martin Luther King Jr. several times in his speeches during the civil rights movement, and has been analyzed by several critics, notably for its style and representation of the mother…

His poem "Mother to Son" was first published in 1922 in The Crisis. The poem was again published in 1926 in The Weary Blues...

Hughes's poems "Mother to Son", "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", and "Harlem" were described in the Encyclopedia of African-American Writing as "anthems of black America”…

Mother To Son - Langston Hughes (in song)

They say she died,— 
Although I do not know,  
They say she died of grief  
And in the earth-dark arms of Death  
Sought calm relief,  
And rest from pain of love 
In loveless sleep. 

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My melody to Hughes' words
3-10sc

From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes.

Young Bride - Langston Hughes (in song)

He carries  
His own strength  
And his own laughter,
 His own today  
And his own hereafter,–– 
This strong young sailor  
Of the wide seas.

What is money for?  
To spend, he says. 
And wine? 
To drink. 
And women? 
To love.  
And today? 
For joy. 
And tomorrow?
 For joy. 
And the green sea
 For strength,  
And the brown land 
For laughter. 
And nothing hereafter.

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My melody to Hughes' words
x2sc
From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes.

Young Sailor - Langston Hughes (in song)

Beat the drums of tragedy for me.
Beat the drums of tragedy and death.
And let the choir sing a stormy song
To drown the rattle of my dying breath.

Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
And let the white violins whir thin and slow,
But blow one blaring trumpet note of sun
To go with me
             to the darkness
                            where I go.

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My melody to Hughes' words
stuaug4 p24 x21sc
Image from pinterest
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First the title - what fantasy… why purple? For Alice Walker, purple was an often ‘overlooked’ colour. ‘Purple prose’ has an opposite meaning of something exaggerated. Personally I find purple an exciting, interesting mix of colours. What was it for Hughes?

Still, this colour describes the ‘fantasy’ of the poem. It is not just a fantasy - maybe something good never or not yet put into action - but a purple fantasy. For me, this sounds like a double superlative.

However, in the poem the writer is dying, and he or she feels their death is a ‘tragedy’. But it is not a tragic death they want to go unnoticed - certainly not without drums, violins, trumpet and choir to play a fanfare [“short ceremonial tune or flourish played on brass instruments, typically to introduce something or someone important”] for their death.

The ‘white violins’ whiring [“something rapidly rotating or moving to and fro to make a low, continuous, regular sound] ‘thin and slow’ seem to be associated with the tragic death drums and ‘stormy song’ of the choir.

All this build up is interrupted by the word ‘But’, which starts the penultimate line and introduces the contrasting ‘one blaring trumpet note of sun’ to accompany the writer/reader into the darkness of death. What had seemed a total tragedy darkness and death is redeemed/transformed with the trumpet’s blare of sunshine, so that there will be light in the darkness.

The last line breaks up into three segments, a number which may refer both to the break up of the body in death and at the same time carry the number’s symbolic significance of completeness and eternity. They might also represent the steps leading down into the earth and/or up into heaven.

Certainly the writer calls for and believes in the strong, loud sound of the trumpet with its optimistic note of sunshine in darkness to accompany the tragedy of death.

Or does the poem say all this is just a purple fantasy?

Fantasy In Purple [Beat the drums] - Langston Hughes (in song)

One who sings “chansons vulgaires”
 In a Harlem cellar
 Where the jazz-band plays 
From dark to dawn 
Would not understand 
Should you tell her 
That she is like a nymph 
For some wild faun.

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My melody to Hughes' words
stuaug11 p8x9sc

Young Singer - Langston Hughes (in song)

With gypsies and sailors, 
Wanderers of the hills and seas, 
 I go to seek my fortune. 
With pious folk and fair
 I must have a parting.  
But you will not miss me,–– 
You who live between the hills 
And have never seen the seas.

From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes. 
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My melody to Hughes' words
stujul28 5-14sc

A Farewell - Tennyson: https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/a-farewell-alfred-tennyson-in-song?si=878c9806fe494f6f8a19e8fb6d831fda&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
The Ancient Mariner's Farewell - Coleridge: https://soundcloud.com/user-734457954/the-ancient-mariners-farewell-in-song?si=ee9dd8e27e5e4f03a43ee7ec4aed4b77&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

A Farewell - Langston Hughes (in song)

SOLEDAD
A Cuban Portrait

The shadows  
Of too many nights of love  
Have fallen beneath your eyes.  
Your eyes, 
So full of pain and passion, 
So full of lies.  
So full of pain and passion,  
Soledad,  
So deeply scarred,  
So still with silent cries.

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My melody to Hughes' words
LHp59 stujul28 5-8cl
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soledad
Soledad means solitude in Spanish, also loneliness and desolation; it is the name of persons and places and of many songs. 

It is also a name for the ‘Chalon people or Soledad, a Native American people and language of Salinas Valley, California’. Tato Laviera says ‘there is no English translation’.


Soledad-A Cuban Portrait - Langston Hughes (in song)

God having a hemorrhage,
 Blood coughed across the sky, 
Staining the dark sea red,  
That is sunset in the Caribbean.

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My melody to Hughes’ words 
LH Bpk 15-23ed2
Painting by Julian Bakkenpaint


Caribbean Sunset - Langston Hughes (in song)

She stands  In the quiet darkness, 
This troubled woman, 
Bowed by 
Weariness and pain, 
 Like an Autumn flower
 In the frozen rain. 
 Like a  Wind-blown autumn flower 
That never lifts its head  
Again. 
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My melody to Hughes’ words
stumay31 x10

Troubled Woman - Langston Hughes (in song)

She
Who searched for lovers
In the night
Has gone the quiet way
Into the still,
Dark land of death
Beyond the rim of day.

Now like a little lonely waif
She walks
An endless street
And gives her kiss to 
nothingness.
Would God his lips were sweet!

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My melody to Hughes’ words
LH p11 x14

To A Little Lover-Lass, Dead - Langston Hughes (in song)

Hey! Hey!
That’s what the
Blues singers say.
Singing minor melodies
They laugh,
Hey! Hey!

My man’s done left me,
Chile, he’s gone away.
My good man’s left me,
Babe, he’s gone away.
Now the cryin’ blues
Haunts me night and day.

Hey! . . . Hey!

Weary,
Weary,
Trouble, pain.
Sun’s gonna shine
Somewhere
Again.

I got a railroad ticket,
Pack my trunk and ride.

Sing ’em, sister!

Got a railroad ticket,
Pack my trunk and ride.
And when I get on the train
I’ll cast my blues aside.

Laughing,
Hey! . . . Hey!
Laugh a loud,
Hey! Hey!

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My melody to Hughes’ words

Blues Fantasy - Langston Hughes (in song)

For the best experience, 
-  Click on the song's picture for words and notes.
-  in Album/Playlist/Spotlight, first click on the big picture to the left, then on the new page click the track title. Really, it's worth the effort :) 

With Blake you will see his painting too. Each picture is in dialogue with the words (not just illustrating them).

Bards have combined music & poetry from earliest times. Many poets continue the connection, not least William Blake. But often their melodies are lost or neglected.

Langston Hughes (in song)

Ian