Boss Soul: The Blues Aesthetics of Langston Hughes and Gil Scott-Heron: A Foreword

Pardon Our Analysis: A Special Issue on Gil Scott-Heron breaks new ground as the inaugural publication to offer a blend of critical and creative perspectives on the writer and musician Gil Scott-Heron. For many scholars, the prospect of analyzing him in tandem with Langston Hughes may seem counterintuitive, and the notion that he elaborated on Hughes’s aesthetic might raise a few eyebrows, particularly since Scott-Heron is often pigeonholed as the Godfather of Rap. Additionally, the two artists were born generations apart; and at first glance, Hughes’s mild-mannered disposition may seem incongruous with Scott-Heron’s colorful, Black street lingo and orientation, not to mention his well-known drug abuse. But philosophically, Scott-Heron may have shared more aesthetic commonalities with Hughes than with any other writer. This is especially evident in their commitments to and conceptualizations of blues aesthetics, which largely determined how their frameworks stood at variance with mind-body dualism. Besides, Scott-Heron was quite vocal about Hughes’s influence. In his liner notes to his album, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron (1978), he muses:It is apposite, then, that Scott-Heron, like Hughes, published two novels, The Vulture (1970) and The Nigger Factory (1972), as well as an autobiography, The Last Holiday (2012), in addition to several collections of poetry, including Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970), So Far, So Good (1990) and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron (2000). Moreover, both artists had brief stints as university lecturers; Scott-Heron earned an MA in creative writing from John Hopkins in 1972. And whereas Hughes released albums such as The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston (1955), The Weary Blues with Langston Hughes (1958), and Tambourines to Glory: Gospel Songs by Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley (1958), Scott-Heron elaborated on his example, blending poetry and music in over twenty albums.Of these, Winter in America (1974), the third of Scott-Heron’s nine collaborations with multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson, deserves special mention because it exemplifies the trademark versatility that distinguishes his aesthetic: an expansive breadth of talents in multiple artistic mediums and genres. Winter in America rose to six on Billboard’s Top Jazz Albums, though it included “The Bottle,” Scott-Heron’s soulful hit single, which peaked at fifteen on the R&B charts while problematizing alcoholism and showcasing his vocal talent. The album also features his prescient song-poem, “H2Ogate Blues,” which received airplay on R&B radio stations and was quoted by youth in predominantly Black neighborhoods.Other memorable recordings include Scott-Heron’s “Angel Dust,” which warns listeners of drug abuse. The song appears on his and Jackson’s jazz-funk album, Secrets (1978), peaking also at fifteen on the R&B charts. Additionally, Scott-Heron’s cover of Bill Withers’s soul song, “Grandma’s Hands” (1981), peaked at eighteen on the R&B charts. And unlike most academically trained intellectuals, both he and Hughes were adept at humor.Yet Hughes scholars rarely mention Scott-Heron,1 and their silence is understandable. Despite the institutionalization of Black Studies and the widespread acclaim for Black literary and cultural theory in the post–civil rights era, scholars have largely overlooked Scott-Heron’s oeuvre, thereby obscuring aesthetic affinities he shares with Hughes.2 Pairing their works together therefore reveals striking parallels. Both Hughes and Scott-Heron cultivated wide audiences while centering everyday Black people in their visions. They also shared similar perspectives about blues, jazz, orality, humor, and more. These aesthetic trajectories are interfaced in Hughes’s later essays, especially “Black Writers in a Troubled World,” his address at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, in April 1966. Reflecting his views on then-current Black writing, the essay criticizes James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and includes his first public statement on soul in African American culture, making it among the earliest to associate soul with African American literature. Hughes also states retroactively that his first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921), represents qualities, characteristics, and mindsets that Black youth designated as soul nearly a half-century later in the mid-1960s.What’s fascinating, though, is that Hughes couches his criticism in a manner reminiscent of Black vernacular signification, so it’s helpful to consider the historical context. Written in the dawn of the Black Arts Movement, “Black Writers in a Troubled World” is a two-part discussion, and understanding Hughes’s brief comments on soul, which occur in the second section, hinges on understanding his criticism, in the first section, of Baldwin’s 1964 play Blues for Mr. Charlie and Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones’s) 1964 play The Toilet. Hence the title: “Black Writers in a Troubled World.” The essay’s central focus concerns criteria for Black aesthetics and critical thinking. Hughes believed that Black writers have a social responsibility to function as truth tellers, and he criticizes Baldwin and Baraka as exemplary figures of a younger generation of writers who decried racial contradictions in artistic forms divorced from aesthetic principles exemplified in foundational aspects of Black expressive culture such as social dancing in bars on Saturday nights or holy dancing in churches on Sunday mornings.According to Hughes, “a prime function” of “creative writing” is “to affirm life, to yeah-say the excitement of living in relation to the vast rhythms of the universe” while “unt[ying] the riddles of the gutter” (“Black Writers” 478). Of course, some might interpret his statement as a milquetoast embrace of respectability politics, especially given Baldwin’s and Baraka’s reputations for radicalism today. But Hughes’s model is basically a blues musician’s credo transposed into literature, and as we will see, his vision of Black literary soul accommodates a broad spectrum of attitudes and political perspectives, including some considered radical. Readers familiar with musicological and ethnomusicological studies of Black music may notice that his criteria—notably his focus on “affirm[ation]” and “excitement”—align closely with those of countless musicians who prioritized emotional and psychological healing among Black people from the earliest spirituals and blues to the futurism of avant-garde jazz and beyond. Hence an erudite corollary to blues and gospel configured at once in an African diasporic context. An important objective of Black writing, Hughes argues, “should be to gather the strengths of our people in Africa and the Americas into a tapestry of words as strong as the bronzes of Benin . . . [and] the beat of the blues . . .” (“Black Writers” 478; italics added). Of course, Baraka published his classic study Blues People: Negro Music in White America three years earlier, in 1963, and he later reconceptualized African American poetry along similar lines. However, Hughes’s criticism of Baraka’s and Baldwin’s playwriting point to problems and criteria that literary scholars have long ignored.Anticipating Harold Cruse’s criticisms in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967), Hughes underlines the underdevelopment of African American publishing houses—and by logical extension, independent Black cultural institutions. At the time, the Johnson Publishing Company was America’s sole Black-owned publisher, creating obstacles for Black writers who, according to Hughes, were often compelled to satisfy “two audiences—one white, one black. And, as long has been America’s dilemma, seldom ‘the twain shall meet’” (“Black Writers” 476). This paradoxical pickle led writers to make unfortunate compromises. At times, “some writers” confused “artistic truth [with] financial success” and “personal integrity” with “critical acclaim” (“Black Writers” 476). Among the main issues, claims Hughes, was the young writers’ determination to avoid “being white-ized” (“Black Writers” 477) during the high point of the civil rights movement when activists like Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) were proselytizing that the word “Black” should supersede “Negro” as the term for African American identification.However, Hughes believed that writers’ responses were too often reductive. In his view, Baldwin’s and Baraka’s plays represent specious expressions of radicalism that essentially conflate profanity with profundity, and he denounces them as “fingerpainting[s] in excrement on America’s lily white canvas” (“Black Writers” 475). Of course, the subject of profanity in Black Arts writing is a complex matter that was widely discussed. Protest writing is generally a limited mode of cultural resistance, and it should be noted that poets Carolyn Rodgers and Eugene B. Redmond later addressed similar issues, though poets like Rodgers herself sometimes cleverly resorted to expletives. Nonetheless, Hughes’s underlying question remains pertinent today: What are the ratios of compatibility between Black writers’ and scholars’ criteria and everyday Black people’s sociocultural experiences?Of course, the irony is that the writers’ employment of profanity reflected their sense of solidarity with Black urban youth, that is, “soul brothers” and “soul sisters” in mid-1960s vernacular. The language that deeply offends Hughes represented an attempt to express the “artistic truth” that he valued so highly. The young writers imagined a Black poetics commensurate with styles, views, and attitudes evinced in Black street culture, particularly the lingo and idioms commonly used in songs, games, toasts, fashion, and conversations. And as it happens, the cultural synergy that Hughes envisions is unmistakable in poet Nikki Giovanni’s collaborations with the New York Community Choir, a gospel-soul ensemble, on the albums Truth Is On Its Way (1971) and Like A Ripple On A Pond (1973). More to the point, Giovanni’s rationale epitomizes Hughes’s idea: “people can put the album on and listen to it and really understand its message” (qtd. in Neal).Nevertheless, Hughes’s core idea is valid: expletives are banal substitutes for the inimitable qualities, characteristics, emotive power, and wisdom that reside in blues aesthetics, which invariably foreground psychosomatic epistemological modalities in Black expression. For instance, the modern-jazz musician Milt Jackson sang gospel before his professional career, and when asked about soul, he replied, “It’s the part of playing you can’t get out of the books and studies. . . . [Soul] is what comes from within; it’s what happens when the inner part of you comes out” (qtd. in Hirshey 77). Scholars have all but ignored the implications of Jackson’s statement, and the fact that he was such an admired figure among jazz musicians (he collaborated with Ray Charles, one of Hughes’s favorite artists) bears significance. Jackson describes a phenomenon distinguishable from language as such, and Hughes imagines an analogous model in “Black Writers in a Troubled World.” He suggests that Baldwin’s and Baraka’s plays were problematic because, unlike blues and soul, they could potentially appease Black people’s sense of injustice and play to white people’s sense of guilt (prefiguring trends in Black academic writing), while simultaneously avoiding or downplaying elements of traditional African American aesthetics, which were invariably blues-tinged and soulful.As it turns out, Black Arts poet Askia M. Touré (then Rolland Snellings) had previously addressed this incongruity in his 1965 essay “Keep on Pushin’: Rhythm and Blues as a Weapon.” In the following years, Baraka, Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, and others followed suit through the tenets of Black cultural nationalism, which was influenced by Maulana Karenga’s Kawaida theory, a (masculinist) Black urban American interpretation of Africanist principles that diminished the historical significance of traditional Black culture, especially Southern-based forms such as the blues, whose frameworks were largely African-derived.All the same, the fact that Hughes placed his soul-statement after his critique hints at signification. In a gesture of one-upmanship at once subtle and imbricated, Hughes represents soul as traditional Black aesthetics, particularly relative to African-derived aesthetic principles. 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