MOTOWN
A look at how the music of Detroit turned into one of the most lucrative businesses in the world and why it left its home.
LANGSTON HUGHES
EARLY LIFE
Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. His parents separated shortly after his birth, his father moving to Mexico and his mother moved around a lot during his youth. Hughes was raised primarily by his grandmother, Mary, as a result, until she died in his early teens. He then went to live with his mother who eventually settled down in Cleveland where he would begin writing poetry. His first introduction was to Carl Sandburg and Walt Witman, who he would later name as primary influences.
Hughes graduated from high school and went to live with his father in Mexico for a year. His poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” wa published in The Crisis to critical acclaim at this point and Hughes returned to the United States to attend Columbia University. After attending Columbia University for a year, he dropped out to begin travelling, going abroad in 1922.
RISE TO FAME
In November of 1924, Hughes returned to the United States. He met an American poet named Vachel Lindsay who used his connections to bring Hughes’s poetry to a wider audience. In 1925, Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s literary competition and Hughes received a scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. It is here that he caught the attention novelist and critic Cark Van Vechten who, similar to Lindsay, aided Hughes in gaining a larger following once more by helping him publish his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues. Hughes’s book established his poetic style and his commitment to black themes and heritage and also introduced him as one of the first to use jazz rhythms and dialect to express what it was like to be a black person working in an urban area.
Hughes fame and success continued to grow. He continued to write and began lecturing on tours throughout the United States and abroad in the Soviet Union, Japan and Haiti. In 1937 he served as a war correspondent for American print news sources for during the Spanish Civil War.
HUGHES AND MOTOWN
Hughes connection to Motown came in when he was sent a complimentary copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Great March to Freedom in August of 1963. On October 8th of the same year, Hughes compose d a letter in which he lauded the importance of audio recordings in a historical context and how important it was for future generations to be able to hear the recordings of the past. This led to Hughes signing a contract with Motown in October of 1963.
Hughes signed on to record an album with Margaret Danner, a Detroit Poet who shared a similar style and themes with him. The recording was tentatively titled Poets of the Revolution and would be released under the Black Forum Records imprint of Motown, which was a spoken word subsidiary of the company that issued recordings from 1970 to 1973. This particular subsidiary focused mainly on albums that featured progressive political and pro-civil rights speeches and poetry. Works by figures such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Elaine Brown, and, as mentioned above, Langston Hughes were published and released by this imprint.