Performed at The Crucible, Madison WI, September 30, 2021

LAUGHIN’ TO KEEP FROM CRYIN’: Oh! Those Blues of Langston Hughes

Created and curated by Quanda Johnson

Very few poets had the pulse of their community like Langston Hughes. A young lion of the Harlem Renaissance, he was descendant to a long line of “race” men and women. Born in poverty on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, Hughes’ life was destined to be steeped in Black excellence, activism, and the Blues. The grandmother who raised him was the widow of Sheridan Leary, one of a handful of Black men who died in John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. As a baby, Hughes had been wrapped in Leary’s bullet-riddled shawl, and his soul must have been stamped with the poetic irony of that defining gesture.

LAUGHIN’ TO KEEP FROM CRYIN’: Oh! Those Blues of Langston Hughes, conceived and curated by Quanda Johnson, is a multilayered tribute to Langston Hughes in his own words. Woven together with his poetry and passion for the Blues, it features dance, a four-piece band, and artists of the spoken word. LAUGHIN’ TO KEEP FROM CRYIN’ celebrates Hughes, not only as the poet laureate of Harlem, but as a literary genius who wrote in every literary form from poems to plays to editorials. His voice was saturated with humor and joy, but also with pathos and a keen awareness of what it means to be Black in the Atlantic world.

Quanda Johnson is a Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She seeks ways to utilize performance to disrupt, and consequently alter, entrenched, cyclical assumptions about Blackness and the African Diaspora. Quanda presented her original works, In Search of Negroland: a different study of the negro race and The Ballad of Anthony Crawford: a love letter to america at the Gallatin Arts Festival, New York University, in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Both are part of her upcoming dissertation artistic performance and gallery exhibition, Trauerspiel: Subject into Nonbeing (spring 2022).

Special thanks to the Evjue Foundation for their support of our Black artists series of performances, and to the Wisconsin Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Cast:

Quanda Johnson, reader/singer

Melvin Hinton, reader, story teller

Akiwele Burayidi, dancer

Sam Olson, bass

Maggie Cousin, alto sax

Dante Turkow, electric guitar

Henry Ptacek, percussion

Program

I. First We Were Africans

Sea Charm

The Negro

II. They Call the Institution “Peculiar”

Sun song

Aunt’s Sue’s Stories

Bound No’th blues

Lincoln Monument: Washington

Old Abe

III. Prayer

Pvt. Jim Crow – A Radio Script, 1943

Dream Variation

Po’ Boy Blues

Minstrel Man

My People

IV. The Ways of White Folks

Sinner

“Slave on the Block,” The Ways of White Folks, 1934

Wide River

“Spring Beside the Kremlin” and “Poetry to the People,” I Wonder as I Wander, 1956

The White Ones

“Simple’s Psychosis”

The Jester:

V. Dream Keepers

The Dream Keeper

Night and Morn

Walkers with the Dawn

“The Blues,” The First Book of Jazz, 1955

“The Kings of History,” The First Book of Negroes, 1952

Lullaby (For a Black Mother)

Dreams

VI. We Want Black Power!

Harlem

“Black Writers in a Troubled World” 1966

Homesick Blues

As I Grew Older

VII. Sharing the Power: A Coalition in Rainbow

I, Too

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

“Princess of the Blues,” Not without Laughter, 1930

Youth

Blues Fantasy

“Jazz, Jive, and Jam,” Simple Stakes a Claim, 1957

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Funding and support for this ongoing project is provided by these organizations:

                     

Bibliography of Hughes works:

Poetry collections

  • The Weary Blues, Knopf, 1926
  • Fine Clothes to the Jew, Knopf, 1927
  • The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, 1931
  • Dear Lovely Death, 1931
  • The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, Knopf, 1932
  • Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play, Golden Stair Press, N.Y., 1932
  • A New Song (1938, incl. the poem “Let America be America Again“)
  • Note on Commercial Theatre, 1940
  • Shakespeare in Harlem, Knopf, 1942
  • Freedom’s Plow, New York: Musette Publishers, 1943
  • Jim Crow’s Last Stand, Atlanta: Negro Publication Society of America, 1943
  • Lament for Dark Peoples and Other Poems, 1944
  • Fields of Wonder, Knopf, 1947
  • One-Way Ticket, 1949
  • Montage of a Dream Deferred, Holt, 1951
  • Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1958
  • Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, Hill & Wang, 1961
  • The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times, 1967
  • The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Knopf, 1994

Novels and short story collections

  • Not Without Laughter. Knopf, 1930
  • The Ways of White Folks, Knopf, 1934
  • Simple Speaks His Mind, 1950
  • Laughing to Keep from Crying, Holt, 1952
  • Simple Takes a Wife, 1953
  • The Sweet Flypaper of Life, photographs by Roy DeCarava. 1955
  • Simple Stakes a Claim, 1957
  • Tambourines to Glory, 1958
  • The Best of Simple, 1961
  • Simple’s Uncle Sam, 1965
  • Something in Common and Other Stories, Hill & Wang, 1963
  • Short Stories of Langston Hughes, Hill & Wang, 1996

Non-fiction books

  • The Big Sea, New York: Knopf, 1940
  • Famous American Negroes, 1954
  • Famous Negro Music Makers, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955
  • I Wonder as I Wander, New York: Rinehart & Co., 1956
  • A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, with Milton Meltzer. 1956
  • Famous Negro Heroes of America, 1958
  • Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP. 1962
  • Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, with Milton Meltzer, 1967

Major plays

Books for children

  • Popo and Fifina, with Arna Bontemps, 1932
  • The First Book of the Negroes, 1952
  • The First Book of Jazz, 1954
  • Marian Anderson: Famous Concert Singer, with Steven C. Tracy, 1954
  • The First Book of Rhythms, 1954
  • The First Book of the West Indies, 1956
  • First Book of Africa, 1964
  • Black Misery, illustrated by Arouni, 1969; reprinted 1994, Oxford University Press.
Laughin’ to Keep From Cryin’ – Oh! Those Blues of Langston Hughes