Hip Hip Hooray to Castillo ensemble member Mike Klein! In the comments section, he posted a link to Langston Hughes reading his poems with musical accompaniment by the Charles Mingus jazz group. The following website has each poem as an individual file (as well as the lyrics translated into Spanish!):
http://www.geocities.com/xxxjorgexxx/hughes1.htm
You need RealPlayer in order to listen to the files.
One of the poems on the recording is called "Notes on the Commercial Theatre." It's about how mainstream commerical theater and film have consistently appropriated black cultural forms for their own ends. I never knew this poem before, but it's powerful and it serves as a calling card for what we're trying to do:
"Notes on the Commercial Theatre" by Langston Hughes
You've taken my blues and gone—
You sing'em on Broadway
And you sing'em in Hollywood Bowl,
And you mixed'em up with symphonies
And you fixed 'em
So they don't sound like me.
Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.
You also took my spirituals and gone.
You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones
And all kinds of Swing Mikados
And in everything but what's about me—
But someday somebody'll
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me—
Black and beautiful—
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it'll be
Me myself!
Yes, it'll be me.
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2 comments:
Another resource on Hughes is California Newsreel's documentary, Hughes' Dream Harlem, which shows the connection between Langston Hughes's poetry and the spoken-word and hip-hop communities today. It's narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0145&s=langston%20hughes
Also, did you know that presidential candidate Bill Bradley read "Let America, Be America Again" at the post-Rodney King 1992 Democratic convention, but left out "(America never was America to me.)" Obviously, he totally changed Hughes's meaning!
Karen, thanks to writing to us all the way from Canada! I'll check out the documentary and we'll bring up the Bradley anecdote in rehearsal tonight. I know that you've done a lot of research about African-American cultural organizations in the 1960s, so I hope you'll keep sending us any relevant info or resources!
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