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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 10 page paper which examines the
influences provided by poet Langston Hughes and novelist/short-story
writer Zora Neale Hurston on African-American blues and theater, by
comparing and contrasting their perspectives, through such works as
(among others), Hughes' 'The Weary Blues' and 'Po' Boy Blues' and
Hurston's short story, 'How It Feels to Be Colored Me,' and the novel,
'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' Bibliography lists 13 sources.
Page Count:
10 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGlanzor.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
especially in terms of self-expression. There had been popular abolitionist authors like Frederick Douglass and James M. Whitfield, but few African-American artists were known to the white establishment literati.
Much of the African-American experience was shaped by slavery, for that is where the love of story telling and blues music came from. The work songs the slaves
would sing to keep their spirits up, were a guaranteed cure for the blues. Even by the 1930s, the slave experience was still influencing future generations, as predominantly variations
of slave folk tales which had been set to music in a vaudeville style known as "minstrel." Minstrel shows were, perhaps, the earliest form of African-American theater, and originally
showcased black performers (not white entertainers in black-face makeup) who told jokes, "Jim Crow" type stories, and performed comedy routines to the rhythm of a drum accompaniment and the blues
of a "boogie-woogie" piano, played by the likes of W.C. Handy ("Jazzing It Up: The Be-Bop Modernism of Langston Hughes" 61). As Zora Neale Hurston once explained in her
historical examination of blues, "The Negro blues songs... belong in the lyric class; that is, feelings set to strings. The oldest and most typical form of Negro blues is
a line stating the mood of the singer repeated three times. The stress and variation is carried by the tune and the whole thing walks with rhythm... Read the
words aloud and you have the tone. The stresses and lack of stresses all come where they would naturally be if the story were told without music. In
other words, the ballad is the prelude to prose (50). It was this largely-segregated artistic environment into which Langston Hughes with his poetic verse, and Zora Neale Hurston, with
...