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.
