‘Jazz at Night and the Classics in the Morning’: musical double-consciousness in short fiction by Langston Hughes

Extract

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – intellectuals such as Jessie Faucet, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois – hoped to gain respect for African Americans through participation in emblems of high culture such as poetry, novels, serious plays, and the highest of all classical music genres: the symphony.¹ They encouraged artists to mine folk themes for use in new, elevating works, transforming ‘indigenous’ materials into uplifting examples of high cultural resonance. Artists themselves, however, were ambivalent about privileging ‘high’ art, and especially so when making and writing about music. Indeed, as Samuel Floyd has argued, the most vibrant music to come out of the Harlem Renaissance took the form of blues, boogie woogie, and hot jazz, found in venues such as clubs, juke joints, rent parties, and stage shows (Floyd 1990, pp. 5–6).