Dust jacket–The Weary Blues, published 1926
The Tenth Annual Boston Arts Festival ran from June 8 to 25 in the Public Garden, with the lively arts well represented. Highlights included Douglas Moore’s opera, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and a revival of George M. Cohan’s The Tavern. June 20 marked the eighth annual Jazz Night. It featured poet Langston Hughes with Jimmy Rushing, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee talking and playing through “The Blues: Words and Music.” Joe MacDonald’s Festival Jazz Orchestra provided the backing. There was more jazz on the 21st, a mainstream swing quintet led by saxophonist Billy Marshall with his brother Walter on drums.
Combining words and music was nothing new for Langston Hughes. In fact, he wrote his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, with the intention of reciting it to music. Hughes finally recorded The Weary Blues in 1958 (MGM E3697), reciting the story of an aging bluesman to the music of Charles Mingus. At the Arts Festival, though, he served as more of a narrator and interpreter, describing the origins of the blues and their place in culture.
Unfortunately, events outside of the Arts Festival detracted from the presence of the renowned poet. A group with the nebulous name of “The American Institute” claimed Hughes was “a Communist sympathizer and a danger to the children of Boston.” They planned to picket on Jazz Night.
The Boston Police assigned extra officers to the Arts Festival and the pickets (28 in all, by one reporter’s count) paraded and distributed literature, but were otherwise peaceful.
Langston Hughes went through the ringer in the McCarthy Red hearings in 1953, admitting to his leftist leanings to the satisfaction of the McCarthy committee. At a Boston news conference on the 21st, he stated that the picketers’ charges were baseless. But he was frustrated that even after eight years, the paranoid fringe could still dredge up the old news, and it got more media attention than Hughes’s art.
And how was the concert? The newspapers didn’t say, because they were too busy counting the picketers. They did note, however, that Bostonians ignored the political sideshow while turning out in record-breaking numbers (a crowd of 20,000) to listen to the blues. I’m sure that Langston Hughes, Jimmy Rushing, and company did not disappoint.