Vari-Colored Songs -- Leyla McCalla

This is a review I recently published on KithFolk, a quarterly online roots music magazine put out my Hearth Music, which you can find here.

With Leyla McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, another artist examines the possibilities presented in setting famous poetry to music. McCalla is not the first to do this—favorites of mine in recent past have included Kyle Alden’s Songs from Yeats' Bee-loud Glade and Martha Redbone’s The Garden of Love—Songs of William Blake. It might seem that such a plan makes life easy on the musician: “Look, free lyrics! Just make up a tune!”, but it is much harder than that, as other musicians have found to their dismay. You see, a successful song is more than good words and good melody. First of all, the two have to fit, as far as style, mood and structure, but more than that, there are some things that we love about good songs that not all poems naturally have; on the other hand, some poems feel like lyrics from the beginning, and this is one reason why McCalla’s choice works so well.

The poetry of Langston Hughes is imbued with music. Music was an important aspect of his the times and settings of his life, in America, Europe and the Caribbean, and of the movement he is famously linked to: the Harlem Renaissance. McCalla calls him “the Duke Ellington of words—painting the most incredible portraits with simple musical ideas that just come together in amazing ways.” Consider the use of jazz in such poems as “Dream Boogie” or “Lennox Avenue: Midnight”:

The rhythm of life

Is a jazz rhythm,

Honey.

The gods are laughing at us.

The broken heart of love,

The weary, weary heart of pain,—

   Overtones,

   Undertones,

To the rumble of street cars,

To the swish of rain.

Lenox Avenue,

Honey.

Midnight,

And the gods are laughing at us.

Or the undertone of the blues in “Song for a Dark Girl”:

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)

They hung my black young lover

To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Bruised body high in air)

I asked the white Lord Jesus

What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie

(Break the heart of me)

Love is a naked shadow

On a gnarled and naked tree.

If I had read those lyrics without knowing they were written by Hughes, I would have guessed Leadbelly or Son House. So McCalla makes the natural step of setting Hughes’s poems to jazz and blues, and the effect is perfect. They are as they were always meant to be.

McCalla shows Hughes’s versatility—and her own—through the variety of music she uses. The upbeat raggy setting of “Too Blue” works perfectly for the wry, morbid humor:

I wonder if

One bullet would do?

Hard as my head is,

It would probably take two.

But I ain’t got

Neither bullet nor gun—

And I’m too blue

To look for one.

The song is perfectly backed up with a tenor banjo and Hawaiian guitar that make the arrangement sound as if it came straight from a smoke-filled 1930s speakeasy.

McCalla feels a deep connection to Langston Hughes; in fact, she called him a focal point in her life, and credited him with inspiring her to pursue a creative path. But this album throws in quite a twist that you might not have seen coming: much of the album is incorporates Haitian folk music. In fact, Vari-Colored Songs is essentially Langston Hughes set to music plus Haitian music, with some overlap between the two. But that twist makes perfect sense not just in McCalla’s life, but for Hughes himself. McCalla’s parents are Haitian, and so the music is of more than academic interest to her, and Hughes himself also felt a deep connection to Haiti. He began one of his books in Haiti, and wrote a play and an opera about Haitian Revolution, and he translated a work by Haitian novelist Jacques Roumain. Hughes was very interested in pan-Africanism, the idea of a world-wide Black culture. You can imagine that he would nod approvingly at the idea of his poems sitting side-by-side with such songs as “Kamèn sa w fè” and “Latibonit”.

McCalla keeps the instrumentation intentionally spare, so we don’t get the sound of big bands. There are no drums or horn section on these tracks. Guitar, banjo and cello are of primary importance. She is very creative with the use of these instruments, though. The opening track, “Heart of Gold”, is built around a strummed cello, shifting back and forth from an A minor to a C ninth, but nevertheless the effect is clearly jazz, aided by McCalla’s excellent vocal ability. She uses this fascinating technique on other tracks as well.

I wouldn’t call Vari-Colored Songs “foot-tapping”; it’s not meant to be party music, as some jazz is. I absolutely would call it “engaging” and “ingenious”, and even “fun”, in the music-and-history nerd sense of the word. Fortunately the CD comes with extensive liner notes, and I recommend listening with the words close at hand at least once. Because the lyrics are poetry first, there is never a wasted word, and Langston Hughes’s wry and insightful wit comes through. The combination of prying questions, political consciousness, and biting wit is one thing that makes the poetry of Langston Hughes so great, as can be seen in such poems as “Cross”, “The Ballad of the Landlord”, and the poem “Vari-Colored Song” itself:

If I had a heart of gold

As have some folks I know

I’d up and sell my heart of gold

And head north with the dough.

But I don't have a heart of gold

My heart's not even lead.

It's made of plain old Georgia clay.

That's why my heart is red.

I wonder why red clay’s so red

And Georgia skies so blue.

I wonder why it's yes to me

And yes, sir, sir to you.

I wonder why the sky’s so blue

And why the clay’s so red;

Why down South is always down

And never up instead.

It’s a perfect combination.

You might also like to check out Kyle Alden's rendition of W. B. Yeats's poems:



And Martha Redbone's take on William Blake, which I reviewed earlier for No Depression.

The River is Rising -- Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

One reason that Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s The River is Rising is interesting is that she is both African (Liberian) and African-American, and she can stand with a foot on each continent.  Her poetry can thus bring together insights and observations from both worlds, and we can see a church service or a landscape in ways that might be alternately familiar or unfamiliar to us, depending on our background.

The thing that captures me about her poetry is the rhythm and pulse created by her repetition and arrangement of phrases.  She does not write verse, but her words are ebullient, and seem to bubble over the edges of the poem.  Simply to say that she uses many resumptive modifiers and absolute phrases makes it sounds like she is just using grammatical tricks, but when seen in action one can understand how she uses these to build energy and flow:

[...]She weeps when she teaches King Lear and his

good-for-nothing daughters.  King Lear, weeping

in the storm, King Lear giving away his fortune

before his death.  My professor wipes her large,

blue eyes when she remembers King Lear. 

I pity my professor who weeps for King Lear,

my professor loves the storm and the rain

and King Lear, caught in the rain [...]

or:

[...] Yes, all the bones below the Mesurado or the St. Paul

or Sinoe or the Loffa River will be brought up

to land so all the overwhelming questions

can once more overwhelm us.

But they are bringing in our lost sister

on a high stool, and there she stands, waiving at those

who in refusing to die, simply refused to die [...]

A number of Wesley’s poems concern her awful experiences in Liberia’s civil strife under the dictator Charles Taylor.   She stands then as a witness to history, even though most of her poetry is made of personal emotion and observation.  Hers is an important role, yet I have to say that I liked much of her other poetry—also made of personal emotion and observation—better.  Poems such as “When My Daughter Tells Me She Has a Boyfriend” (there is tension over whether the boyfriend is black, and whether a mother has a right to ask) and “After the Memorial” (about a student’s death) touch me more.  I’m curious as to why.  Possibly I simply can relate better to things closer to my experience, and civil war is simply too far away; possibly it is just very difficult to memorialize the details of history and not sound like a news report.

Nevertheless, because of her broad range of experience and deft ability with imagery and words, “The River is Rising” offers something for everyone, written with sincerity and passion.

Poem Written From a Single Snapshot

On the beach in Monrovia

my children and I are building sandcastles.

You can see the Atlantic’s waves in the distance,

fighting for a place to roll their way onto shore.

Waves are flapping in the wind

as the tide rises up and down.

Before we know it, we are in the middle of water.

Besie is two years old.  MT, who is only

six months, clings a short arm around my knee.

He’s staring at Besie and the sandcastle

she’s erecting with her right foot.

This is how my mother taught me

to build a sandcastle.

You put your foot down and build mounds around it until

the castle becomes stable.

This is how we search for home.

You put your foot down in a place long enough

that new place becomes home.