So, what’s in that scrapbook? There were a bunch of clippings from magazines or newspapers, sometimes pictures from them, sometimes articles, often about people in the entertainment business. A couple of letters. Ephemera from places, like business cards, tickets, a cocktail napkin. A few things related to Hollywood movies. A theater program. A restaurant menu. And photos, some posed “publicity shots” for musical combos or performers, some amateur snapshots. Even more than 40 years ago when I received the scrapbook, the pages these things were attached to were starting to fragment, and stuff that was likely attached to the dried-out paper was now loose inside the book, making it hard to leaf through. Alas, there were almost no captions or notations anywhere by the scrapbook’s maker. From clothing, cars, and dates on the clippings it was from the 1940s and 50s.
I think I tried when I received it in the 1980s to determine if it had a story, but I couldn’t really figure it out. Because a majority of faces in the scrapbook were Black, I thought it was safe to assume it was kept by someone who was also Black. On thinner grounds, I made another likelihood assumption: that it was made and kept by a woman. Somehow, it seemed feminine to me, and I could imagine someone fan-crazy about music collating this book. But there was a lot of miscellany to it too. One plurality thread seemed to be in the entertainers’ pictures and clips: a band that called itself The Cats and the Fiddle.
Stuff from the crumbling scrapbook that I’ll be examining this month.
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I’d never heard of them, and back in the pre-Internet age it wasn’t easy to find out about them. In the pictures they were an all-Black group in sharp suits. The “fiddle” was the bass fiddle — a standup bass player* was in all the pictures of the band. The rest of the small combo were playing a range of fretted stringed instruments. I could see one of the guitars had just four strings, and I knew that was a tenor guitar, an instrument that otherwise looked like the acoustic guitar I was playing with Dave in our punk folk band then. I knew that it was developed to allow 4-string tenor banjo players to transition over to the guitar as the banjo faded out as a Jazz instrument. Another would hold a regular archtop hollow-body guitar. And there as an odd instrument I could make out in some pictures: smaller than a conventional guitar, with more than 6 strings. The Cats and the Fiddle looked pre-rock’n’roll, but it didn’t look particularly like the Chicago Blues bands I knew of then, nor was it a typical modern Jazz combo that I listened to. No keyboards, no drummer.
I somehow located an LP record, a reissue collection of some of their recordings. They played hot tempo, small combo, hard swinging Jazz backing accompanying their own tightly-grouped vocal blends. This was a genre I knew only a little about. It had largely faded out as popular music by the time I was aware of music, but I had encountered something like it in acts that were reviving 40s-era genres, nationally: The Pointer Sisters, Bette Midler, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, and locally a band called Rio Nido. As a guitarist The Cats and the Fiddle were easy for me to take a liking to. Though a vocal group, the energetic short solo breaks on the guitars still sounded fresh to me, a fellow stringed instrument plucker. I’m not sure if I stole any licks, but I would have liked to have.
What is this group doing in cold Minnesota? A movie clip shows they can take to the snow!
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There was something else about the songs: many of them were lyrically about what might have been called the Jazz life: referencing the music itself, but also things connected with it: drinking, partying, hepcat slang, and those “Jazz cigarettes.” There were a handful of lovelorn ballads, but the approach more often was near-hypermania good times. No drummer, but the combo’s rhythm was solid, and that accompaniment was not mixed down low way behind the vocals.
Proof that Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn didn’t invent the behind-the-back guitar strum
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There were liner notes on the LP sleeve. Yes, they were a ‘40s group. I can’t recall if the notes mentioned where the musicians were from or what region the band worked out of, but I know I was looking for a tie to Minnesota where the scrapbook ended up, and didn’t find any. One thing the reissued LP did reveal: one of the members was Tiny Grimes. I’m not a hard-core Jazz historian, but I knew of Grimes — a contemporary, though longer-lived, of electric guitar pioneer Charlie Christian. Guitarist Grimes, like Christian, was present at the creation as Swing music morphed into Be-Bop.
I put that scrapbook away, and when I moved to my present home, it stayed on an upper shelf in my study where I work on the pieces you read here. Did I decide I had hit a dead end with the scrapbook, or was I just busy with my life then as sometime gigging member of a band? Probably a little of both. I’d sometimes look up at it, look at it looking down at me, and I’d think: I should get back to it sometime, see what more I can determine.
And this is the month I did that. More to come, as I examine the scrapbook again for Black History Month 2025.
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*Well, not always an upright bass player, as you can see in the second video clip.
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday coming into greater recognition as a celebration of the ending of America’s race-based chattel slavery. Why this date? I repeatedly warned you that I can’t tell a story simply and briefly, but for this holiday I have an excuse.
Slavery began in the American British colonies somewhat haphazardly, but by the time we became an independent country we had lots of laws, customs, and beliefs to entrench it. As it often is with the mechanics of oppression, the structures to hold it up took work to maintain, and by the 1850s there was great worry between slaveholders that it would collapse. In the 1860 election, Lincoln won, and even though he’d stated a politician’s compromise middle ground on the slavery issue, his party included enough abolitionists that most powerful slave-holders were ready to press their states to rebel and set up their own government. Civil war ensued.
Which didn’t free the slaves — at least not yet.
Of course the enslaved had been freeing themselves, when they could, all along. Armed rebellions hadn’t worked for more than moments, but the brave, lucky, and skilled might successfully flee at least from the slave-holding states if not to Canada where US law couldn’t touch them.* But it wasn’t easy traveling all that far.
Once the war started in 1861, some enslaved people recognized they could try a shorter route: just make it to the Union troop’s camps, and a good many did just that, which created an awkward situation. You see: nothing had ended slavery’s legal framework, Lincoln still maintained he wasn’t doing that (if only because a few slave-holding states and slaveholders remained on the Union side). He just wanted to put down the rebellion.** Law still said the slaves were property.
Someone on the Union side came up with a peculiar idea. If the enslaved were legally property, they could be confiscated during wartime like a cannon, horse, ship or other enemy property could be. Dehumanizing language? Sure, but escaping past the Union lines meant an increasing chance that they wouldn’t be taken back.
Eventually, Lincoln supersized that freedom, by declaring that all the enslaved in the states in rebellion were free. This, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863. American slaves elsewhere? Nope, not in the Proclamation. Slave owners in places under Confederate rebel control? Not gonna listen to Lincoln’s order. In April of 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of Confederate troops, but that still didn’t mean all enslaved were free, and the legal matter wasn’t consolidated until December of that year with the adaptation of the 13th Amendment.
A couple chapters back I talked about how slow by modern standards communication could be in the mid-19th and early 20th century. Well, it was slower yet when not everyone was on-board with the news. Juneteenth, with an absurdity that is so often a part of America’s racial history, celebrates when Union troops got over to Texas in June of 1865 to announce that the war had been over for over a month and the enslaved in Confederate Texas were no longer legally slaves.
When I left off I was (more or less) talking about folk songs and the songs collected in the American Midwest before WWI by poet Edwin Ford Piper. I’ve also already mentioned that folk songs aren’t unchanging, and aren’t pure. While going through the yellowing paper in Piper’s archives, I came upon this song, handwritten in his own handwriting. He has the title as “The Little Octoroon.” Things aren’t going to get simple here readers. I can’t be simple.
The song as Edwin Ford Piper heard it from his mother
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Octoroon is a largely obsolete word, derived from a lot of rigmarole regarding how Black someone was. It means 1/8th (octo=8) Afro-American. In general, the mumbo-jumbo legal biochemistry in American history regularly said it didn’t make much difference. Half, quarter, sixteenth — hell, for those who had trouble with fractions it was sometimes written down as: 1% Black, you’re legally Black.
An octoroon may not look Black. I can still recall when I was 14 or so, and having grown up in a tiny rural Iowa town. An Afro-American man who was a civil-rights activist was to visit my church camp. He arrives. Wait — that man’s Black? I remember in my naivete looking at his summer hands and forearms. The man had freckles people!
So why does this song, which is clearly a song from the Union and Abolitionist side make some point about the child being an octoroon? This will get weird: it was possible to be an abolitionist and a white supremacist thinking Afro-American’s inferior. Yes, you could be smart and ignorant at the same time! If you’re trying to end chattel slavery, and you’re counting votes or troops, you might not care to make a sticking point about this, ugly as it is. Those with pseudo-scientific beliefs such as an octoroon is “nearly a white person” might have stirrings of respect. (Ugh!) And then at the unconscious, illogical level, there’s the factor of that person looking much like me, so maybe they should have rights like me. Even if it’s a song (something with no visual element) those factors may have entered into its composition.***
While there are no notes I saw in the archive that Piper knew this, this song does have a composer: George F. Root. Root didn’t quite reach Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett level of 19th century American songwriter fame, but he had his “hits” such as they were in the pre-recording era. During the Civil War period and based out of Chicago, he specialized in songs for the Union side.
The sheet music from George F. Root’s music publishing firm. When Piper remembers his mother singing this tune, it would have been only 10-years-old.
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Did Piper’s mother learn this from someone else? Was there sheet music in a piano bench for this, unknown to the 5-year-old Piper? In the quiet library archive, I visualized two white people, a mother and child, in rural frontier Nebraska sharing this song. The differences in the printed song from the one Piper wrote down from his mother’s singing say this isn’t likely a handwritten copy from sheet music.****
Here’s my conclusion, which I hope I’ve demonstrated even though I’ve trimmed parts of this piece back: Juneteenth is the most complicated American legal holiday. The only simple thing about the holiday is that it stands for freedom and the lifting of oppression. Taken at its whole, though messy and with calculated delay, that makes it a favorite of a person like me, who still cries and wonders at how simple truths and rights take so long to be established. The song I’m performing today, its path and turning into a folk song, isn’t that complicated — but yes, the path of American freedom is.
You can hear my performance of Root’s “The Little Octoroon” with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternate.
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*In 1850 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed that required northern state governments, not just the federal government to return enslaved people who reached northern states. Some cities and states wouldn’t comply (there’s this Minnesota case for one example).
Piper’s mother was in Canada near the US border in this era. It’s possible that fugitive slaves might have crossed over into her region. I also note that Piper says she was singing it in 1876, perhaps because that’s the border of Edwin Ford Piper’s memory, but I read the date and think about it being the year Reconstruction largely ended and new de-jure laws and customs greatly restricted Afro-American citizenship.
**No, Nicki Haley, slavery was the cause of the Civil War, even though many liked to parse Lincoln’s compromise and coalition statements of this time to make it sound like it wasn’t. The flaw in that framing? Lincoln didn’t start the war, the South did, and they were explicit in proclaiming why they did it.
***There’s another song using this terminology that this Project has already presented: Longfellow’s scathing pre-Civil War poem “The Quadroon Girl.”In Longfellow’s poem the situation leading to that poem’s mixed-race child is laid out: feudal concubinage and/or rape by slaveholders. For making a speech implying the same, Longfellow’s friend, US Senator Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life on the floor of congress.
****The biggest difference: the printed song’s title calls out the chorus — it’s officially “Glory, Glory, The Little Octoroon.” I only sang the martial chorus twice in my performance because I was more drawn to the bravery and sacrifice told in the verses. We have two holidays that say soldiers made us free, but it’s not only soldiers.
I followed Piper’s transcription for the words, not the printed lyrics, honoring the chain of transmission to me rather than accuracy. I also modified Root’s tune and chords to suit my tastes and tendencies. I could not help but think of these things as I sang this: first, the mother, her family heritage caught in that sexual exploitation making the choice to stay and face the slave hunters and their dogs to assure her child’s escape. We never find out if she and the daughter will be reunited, or even if she survives. Then next I think of those pursuers who to the degree they are portrayed in the song would be gaslight villains — but in history they would be real people doing great evil, who could be thinking they were serving justice. And then lastly, the final-verse gunner who cares for the child, though he’s more the Horatio of the story, with the mother being the tragic hero. I ask you not to skip over the villain characters. It’s fine if you empathize with the gunner, but some great dangers in one’s life (and often to other lives) are those middle souls, like the slavecatcher pursuers, who have a system that tells them they are arduously, justly, doing right.
John Sinclair lived an eventful life. He’s likely still most well-known for his “10 years for two joints” marijuana sentence, and secondarily for his connection with Midwestern 1960s high-energy rock music as a manager and promoter. Maybe you know too of his founding of a White Panther Party, the quixotic attempt to translate the charismatic radicalism of the Black Panthers to young white hippies.
He was a provocative guy, and he seems to have had a promotional streak to go with that. As I often say about folks like Sinclair: no sane person can likely agree with everything he said and did. Feel free to feel about him however you did before you read this, but there’s a particular reason for a piece using his words today.
This is the last day of (U.S.) National Poetry Month, but it’s also International Jazz Day. The connection of poetry with Jazz seems to have gone back to the very beginnings of Jazz. While Jazz is a predominantly instrumental music, it grew out of a sung Afro-American music that got called Blues. Besides accompanying Blues singers, Jazz musicians often used instruments to evoke the vocal parts of Blues even when the singers weren’t present. And just as Jazz music can use abstract sounds to stand for speech, a lot of Jazz musicians infuse music into the way they talk about their life or their art. The formula of music + words is the formula of poetry.
Long time readers here may recall that I’ve made a point that lyrics in the Blues tradition are Afro-American Modernist verse, and that we can choose to frame them as such — but it’s not so novel for cultural historians to note Afro-American Jazz as an important part of Modernism in music.
Given these connections, it should be no surprise that Jazz Poetry is a long-standing flavor of American verse. Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes wrote it early in their careers. Sandburg even sang Blues-adjacent songs. Beats adored Jazz, often thought it a literary model, and the mid-century commonplace of bohemians intoning poetry beside a Jazz combo is a influence on this Project that shouldn’t be hard to see. The Black Arts movement welded itself to Jazz too, its poetry often spoke of that music’s artists while Jazz music played.
It turns out that alongside the other things John Sinclair was, he was also a Jazz fan particularly intrigued by Jazz’s rebels. He wrote Jazz criticism, and Jazz poetry before doing anything else he was remembered for, and he kept writing that Jazz poetry throughout his life. When I read that Sinclair had died during the first week of this April’s National Poetry Month, I sought out some of that poetry of his.
The examples you can hear today may surprise you. They did me. For all Sinclair’s association with high-energy music and radical politics I expected some rantings of a passionate sort, strong declamations. He may have written some of that, but these two you can hear me perform were the ones that intrigued me the most. They might seem too casual to be poetry or even public speech, save for his intent to frame them so. They don’t even contain his own words for the most part. Instead, they are statements attributed to Jazz pianist/composer/bandleader Thelonious Monk.
Monk’s a unique creature, even in the highly individualized world of creative Jazz musicians. He was present at the creation of Bebop in NYC in the 1940s, but unlike many of that style’s pioneers there was puzzlement at his skills. To not put too fine a point on it, many connoisseurs weren’t sure he was a good musician. His piano technique was unorthodox, his note choices seemed odd-to-wrong even within the extension of harmonic language that Bebop was proposing. Was that a misunderstanding by (largely white) outside authorities? There’s more: Monk confounded other skilled Jazz musicians who thought he was erratic, not always a steadfast partner in their musical combos that could give the other soloists a predictable foundation to solo over. And on stage he would sometimes extend his eccentricities by leaving the keyboard to sort of dance and wander about the stage.
A remarkable thing happened over a decade or so of this limbo. His compositions became more and more accepted by other musicians, and with wider repetition what once seemed peculiar now seemed irresistibly catchy. Eventually they were deemed masterpieces. Other players started to understand Monk’s unique off-kilter phrasing and rhythm sense. And those odd stage antics became lovable, even if they also could have been worrying. As they would say today, Monk wasn’t neurotypical — and there’s been posthumous talk of schizophrenia-like psychosis. For a Black man working on the fringes of an increasingly marginalized art form in a mid-century America, that Monk eventually achieved so much is a monumental achievement.
Sinclair knew all this. I suspect he trusted you might know this too, and that’s why I’m taking your time to give you this capsule history of Monk. What Sinclair does collect and write down of what Monk says about his art and being an artist seems so modest — both for the poet and the musician. In the first poem, “recollections for allen ginsberg” Monk claims in effect that he’s discovered the pluperfect American music as just being in this America, ready to be gathered and heard. And the lack of esteem and appreciation he’d received by fans, esteemed critics, and other musicians? The second poem Sinclair gathers (gathers like the Jazz that’s everywhere) and titles “worry later – san francisco holiday – for my mother” says he intends to persevere trusting himself, eschewing worry about the lack of understanding. Why does he think that, how does he go on making art? The making itself: “my playing seems to work!” he says. Is he saying that he himself understands the achievement of his own work based on his goals, and so is glad he made it — or is he saying that the concreteness of making something that integrates into a something that didn’t exist before is the best therapy for a life that could otherwise be consumed with worry and doubt? My understanding is that he’s saying both.
My performance of Sinclair’s two poems features my best attempt at realizing a Monk-ish composition to accompany it. There are two unfinished drafts of this post where I tried to come to confessional terms with my feelings about that process of realizing the piece and my audacity to present myself in the context of real musicians with lives devoted to their craft. I decided to spare you all the breast-beating since I came to see that as boring. As a composer, I guess I could conclude with a variation of that Monk quote “I’ll tell you one thing: my composition seems to work.” You likely saw the video link above, but if you prefer just the audio, there’s a graphical audio player below, and this backup highlighted link for those who don’t see the player.
We’ve come to the end of our Black History Month series on early 20th Century Black Chicago poet Fenton Johnson. Let me try to wrap things up with a few summary points — which as I’ll warn again, are preliminary and include speculation on my part. Long post, so the headings may help you if parts of this are of more or less interest.
Was Fenton Johnson able to achieve his goals during his lifetime?
No. He seems to have had very high goals however. He wanted a general readership for his poetry across racial lines, he wanted to be part of the solution to “the racial problem” in America. For an Afro-American poet of his time being able to publish several book length collections, or to receive any notice for his poetry should mark him as achieving something. But those books were all self-published and likely had a small audience. It’s unlikely that he had anything like Paul Laurence Dunbar’s audience in the Black community, and his white cross-over audience was small. These are estimates: but it’s clear he didn’t “break-through” with either audience — and his political platform seems unremarkable and no more successful than early 20th Century America was in general when addressing racial discrimination and oft-times violent white supremacy.
Why did he fail in that?
Remember one of this Project’s mottos: “All Artists Fail?” Even the most successful will be misunderstood and will be downrated for cause by some, will have a limit to their reach even if popular or well-ranked. But even if we don’t rate him against a perfect score, he didn’t succeed to the level of Dunbar, and he was superseded by his successors in the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes in Black or white readership. My guess: he overrated the audience value of his verse and likely highly overrated the value of his prose/journalism. It’s easy to suppose that he was a bright young man seeing himself in the eyes of youth protected at least at first by the loving support his family was able to give him, but not necessarily with the eyes of a skilled careerist or marketer. His early poems have more value than his contemporaries judged, but some of that value was too deeply coded for some to appreciate in the pre-WWI era. Judging from the small portion of his journalist-writing I’ve read, his efforts there may have displaced his stronger talents. His later poems? James Weldon Johnson’s evaluation of Fenton Johnson in the 1931 version of The Book of American Negro Poetry points out that FJ was uniquely despairing for an Afro-American poet, and contrasts him with Claude McKay’s famous poem “If We Must Die” from the same era as “Tired,” discerning that McKay at least says we can, we should, fight back. One thing that is odd about Fenton Johnson, he’s unsparing about deprivations of rights and dignity for Black Americans in his poetry while maintaining this public face in his presentation of “we just need to listen to each other and work together.” Even onward into the era of Jim Crow and the Great Depression he might have been both too down-beat and too optimistic.
Further supposing on my part: Johnson seems to have been discouraged around 1920 by the evident failure of his audacious goals, and there’s a report that the self-funding from family sources had dried up. I don’t know how dire his life was after 1920, but his pre-WWI Black middle-class status might have changed in ways that refocused his life and added new obstacles. A lot of modern poets reach their heights in writing quality and audience in middle age, which was about the time Johnson’s poetry stops being published.
The Harlem Renaissance has been informally extended to include writers who weren’t NYC located in retrospect, but Frank Marshall Davis and Margaret Walker from between-the-wars Chicago indicated that patronage support and publishing contracts were not at New York levels in Chicago then. Yes, there was a Chicago Renaissance in Black writing, but that came after Johnson stopped publishing.
If Johnson’s early attitudes continued, he may have had a disconnect with some Black literary cultural outlooks that followed WWI. I’ve yet to find anything linking him directly to Temperance/Prohibition, but he writes often enough about alcohol as the marker of a fallen state. He seems to have retained a religious component until he stopped writing — and even the religious have been known to disdain those whose religion differs only slightly from their own, as much or more than non-believers. And lastly, Johnson is explicitly adamant that he’s against “the Bolsheviks,” and commented to friends that this was hurting him in literary circles.
If he’s just some poet who didn’t rise to an undeniable level of success, why read him?
I think there’s unqualified value in the best of Johnson’s poetry. Historically, reading even his lesser-known poems can tell us something about what a smart Black man in this “bridge era” was thinking and writing.
Johnson is precedent-setting in the use of Afro-American musical forms in poetry. This particularly endears him to me. This element alone is highly important culturally and should cause him to be more widely considered. He was active in an era when our resources for Afro-American speaking and musical expression are scarce, so there’s some musicological interest on top of literary value.
You were so down on his political essays. Would you rather he was some kind of radical who might have been tied to between wars dictators? Or hassled by the Red Squads?
No. They were just disappointing in their slack writing and surface allegiance to common political stances without any vivid insights. The man I see in his poems is much sharper than the essayist I’ve read so far. It’s possible that that writing was insincere, that he’s trying to market himself, probably to white audiences who might help fund him. Was he conscious of this split in himself? I can’t say. One may think of one of Dunbar’s best-known poems “We Wear the Mask.”
After he stopped publishing poetry, his friendships in Chicago included those who would be aligned with more leftist politics. As with his non-extant post-1920 poetry, his political analysis might have continued to evolve.
Even some relatively unsuccessful writers influence those who come later. Is Johnson one of those?
Incomplete, but there may be something there. Although his post-WWI poems are few, they were anthologized, and anthologies are still a place younger writers find ideas of the possibilities of their own poetic voice. This Project is an anthology of a kind, and I’ve tried to add that his “spirituals” are worthy of re-evaluation.
This month, I was able to read two accounts of the next generation of Black midwestern poets (Margaret Walker and Frank Marshall Davis) who lived in pre-WWII Chicago, knew Johnson, and mention Johnson’s connection with other writers in this period when Johnson was no longer publishing. Davis (who is himself a bridge between the pre-WWII Black poets and the post WWII Black Arts Movement) admired Johnson and found his work validating his own. Little that I know beyond that, but at least by association there’s a possibility that a later-in-life Fenton Johnson may have influenced these other writers first or second-hand, even after he ceased publishing himself.
AFAIK, this is the only known photo of Fenton Johnson, from when he was in his 20s. We have more photos of Emily Dickinson or Robert Johnson.
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Summing Up, and A Musical Piece for Today
In closing, there’s still more for me to find out about Fenton Johnson, even if it’s likely that I (or any “we’s” reading this and sharing my curiosity) will never find out other details that would illuminate him. We have those final poems before he “went dark” as far as literature is concerned, and I’ll maintain that his earlier work has qualities worth re-assessing. Yes, he’s a case of someone who dreamed big, maybe spread himself too thin, maybe his self-regard was blind, maybe he underestimated the resources and skills needed — all that “reach exceeds his grasp” stuff. And he certainly had to deal with generalized and persisting cultural undervaluing of Afro-Americans — so this isn’t a simple case of hubris. His most famous poem, that despairing “Tired” remains on various printed pages silently waiting to be found — but there’s an unwritten poem that sums Fenton Johnson up for me: “Tried.”
His most famous poem, that despairing “Tired” remains on various printed pages silently waiting to be found — but there’s an unwritten poem that sums Fenton Johnson up for me: “Tried.”
For today’s musical piece I’ll give you something sung by Dave Moore. It’s called “When the Dream Outruns the Real.” Dave didn’t write it about Fenton Johnson, but it is about anyone who tries, dreams, and doesn’t make it. Here’s what I think is cool about what Dave wrote and sang: it’s not a rote put-down. Easy to laugh at the over-reachers, easy to mark it all down to vanity. The Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes preaches that “All is vanity.” Could that mean we laughers are vain too? You can hear The LYL Band perform this with the audio player below, or with this backup highlighted link.
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Here’s my sketchy and incomplete timeline of what I know of Fenton Johnson’s career.
1888
Born in Chicago on May 7. An only child and his parents are middle-class. There seems to have been at least some modest wealth in other branches of his family. According to his later friend Arna Bontemps, he starts writing at age 9.
Circa 1905
At least one play was produced in Chicago while he’s a high school student. There are scattered other mentions of Johnson writing plays, but I’ve found nothing about what they were about or if there was much notice of them.
1906
His early model, Afro-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar dies. Around the same time he graduates from Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago. Attends Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, does post-graduate work at Columbia University in NYC circa 1914.
1910
Briefly teaches at a HBCU, Simmons College in Kentucky, founded by the Baptist church.
1909
He submits a manuscript (handwritten on lined paper from the scanned copy I’ve seen) to Doubleday as a non-fiction diary, though it’s fiction. It survived, though unpublished. Titled a “A Wild Plaint,” the main character in the story commits suicide due to the stresses of his Afro-American life. I have not read this yet.
1913
Self-publishes his first book, a poetry collection A Little Dreaming which has a wide variety of poems in subject matter and styles reflecting mainstream 19th century poetry modes as well as dialect poetry. Dedicated to a relative who may have helped finance its printing.
1915
Returns to Chicago, presumably ending his education. Self-publishes his second book Visions of the Dusk. Dedicates it to Albert Shaw, a well-known white reviewer who had given a favorable review to his first book.
1916
Founds The Champion magazine in Chicago and is listed as its editor. It’s uncertain how many issues are published. One issue does exist as a scanned complete copy. I just found it online, though I haven’t read it yet. Also in 1916 comes a third volume of self-published poetry, Songs of the Soil, which concentrates on his dialect verse.
1918
Founds The Favorite Magazine. Again, it’s unsure how many issues there were, but it may have been as few as two. Published Three Negro Spirituals: “How Long, O Lord,” “Who is That A-Walking in the Corn,” and “The Lost Love” in the June issue of Chicago’s influential Poetry magazine.
1919
Publishes his best-known poem,“Tired,” in the January issue of The Others. The Others circulation is small, but it’s an influential landmark little magazine focusing on the new American avant-garde poetry
Publishes five poems in the February issue of The Others: “Aunt Hannah Jackson” “Aunt Jane Allen,” “The Gambler,” “The Barber,” “The Drunkard”
Publishes “The Artist” and “Dreams” in The Others April-May issue.
1920
Self-publishes two short books: For the Highest Good and Tales of Darkest America. The former is a reprint-collection of pieces from The Favorite Magazine and they are largely anodyne Republican party material. The latter is a short stories collection which sustains some interest while not demonstrating that Johnson is a great undiscovered short-fiction writer.
Around this year Johnson seems to have another ready manuscript of new poems, but is apparently unable to find a commercial publisher and family funds to self-publish another book are denied.
1921
Published Two Negro Spirituals: “A Dream” and “The Wonderful Morning” in the December issue of Poetry magazine.
1922
James Weldon Johnson publishes the first anthology of Afro-American poetry at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. He includes five of Fenton Johnson’s poems including “Tired,” marking down Fenton Johnson as someone to be remembered in future surveys of Black verse. JWJ says little about FJ in his preface, saying he “gives promise of greater work than he has yet done.” Fate laughs: FJ is no longer publishing poetry. Nearly a decade later JWL publishes a new edition of A Book of American Negro Poetry and has more to say about FJ then, notes his work is uniquely despairing.
1925
The Cabaret Girl, a play he wrote was staged at Chicago’s Shadow Theatre. I know nothing about the work, nor of any other public work by Fenton Johnson after this.
Works for the Federal Writers’ Project part of the WPA. Others recall he was also in the “South Side Writer’s Group” of Afro-American writers including Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, and others. The young Gwendolyn Brooks may have been connected to this group’s later incarnations.
Margaret Walker says she worked with WPA/FWP in Chicago while a senior at Northwestern. She reports Nelson Algren, Jacob Scher, James Phelan, Sam Ross, Katherine Dunham, Willard Motley, Frank Yerby, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Sterling A Brown, and Fenton Johnson were also in the Chicago WPA.
Personal note: my relative Susan Glaspell was also associated with the Chicago FWP during the Great Depression. I don’t know how officially or unofficially the FWP was racially segregated, so there’s no guarantee my relative and Johnson even knew of each other. I know of no work of interest ascribed to Fenton Johnson from the FWP, at least as yet.
1958
Fenton Johnson dies in Chicago on September 17. Some of his papers etc. reported destroyed in a basement flooding event. Arna Bontemps was his literary executor.
Given that there’s no full biography for Fenton Johnson, and that it would be difficult to produce one with reliable levels of detail at this late date, this post is going to resort to a measure of speculation. Reader beware: I’m not a fully engaged scholar, and my knowledge of American and Afro-American history for the early 20th century is only a little better than average. Still, I want to write this post during Black History Month to give a fuller picture of this interesting, if lesser-known, literary figure incorporating some additional information that has become available to me.
From my earliest encounters with Johnson’s work last decade, I’d read that he founded two magazines around 1920 that seemed to be concerned with political issues. What was he writing there? What were his political alliances, his political and social opinions? The possible range of positions here are wide — the early 20th century was a dynamic period, including one of the periodic “backlash” swings in American commitment to racial equality, while it was also an era where the “make it new” artistic movements included many in the arts who explicitly aligned themselves with radical political change. Just as to be a Modernist poet likely led them to make common cause with other Modernists in drama, painting, music, sculpture, etc, — the Modernists were often drawn to new, radical, political movements. A whole spectrum of such alignments were on offer: everything from revolutionary Communism spurred by the recent Soviet Russian Revolution, to Catholic Worker or Democratic Socialism, to anarchism, to various kinds of American Lost (Confederate) Cause racism, to the new violent reactionary nationalist cadres that came to be known as Fascism.
No matter what your personal political convictions are, looking into the alignments of Modernists in the first half of the 20th century is land-mine territory if you believe that the poets you read must have steadfastly maintained recognizably similar political beliefs to your own. Some of them even traced apostate paths making them bipolar pariahs!
For a moment let’s revisit Fenton Johnson’s most famous poem, “Tired.”
A little-appreciated aspect of Johnson’s most famous poem: it’s written in a persona. The speaker is clearly not Johnson himself.
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Published in an avant-garde poetry magazine in 1919, it could have been written 50 years later, and it would have fit right in. Dashikis, big Afros, raised left fists, and conga drums would sit well in between this poem’s lines — and frankly, lines like “I’m tired of building up somebody else’s civilization” still sound a radical critique today. In Johnson’s biographic summary for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame it’s said that Others editor/founder Kreymborg called Johnson “The first radical poet.” James Weldon Johnson* wrote slightly more specifically that Fenton Johnson was “One of the first Negro revolutionary poets” when he expanded his opinion of him in a revised 1931 edition of his landmark The Book of American Negro Poetry.
Oh, I thought, if I could only read Fenton Johnson in his short-lived The Favorite Magazine which was said to have included essays on his political and social opinions circa 1919 when he’s also publishing his revolutionary poetry in Others! I’m not sure how many issues there were of this magazine (it may have been a few as two), but as far as online materials there’s only a handful of lo-res scans showing clippings (not even entire pages) of The Favorite Magazine that I’ve found. What I did find was a good PDF scan of Johnson’s book For the Highest Good, from 1920 which seems to be his attempt to save and further distribute selections from that magazine.
Whatever my expectations might have been, the result was disappointing. The titular essay is the most informative. It’s a summary of his expressed credo that “Co-Operation Will Solve the Race Problem.” The rest of this very short book reads like hack-journalism in an obsequious mode. Politically it’s closely aligned with the Republican party.** Three essays in the short book are spent extolling the party, an obscure Republican politician/journalist, and the then current Republican mayor of Chicago, the famously corrupt William Hale Thompson.*** Johnson is adamant at declaiming his firm opposition to “Bolshevism.” His economic and labor platform seems to be (like his platform for racial and civil rights problems) mutual cooperation as well. Labor and Business need to work together he urges. One of the hard-to-read lo-res scanned clippings from the actual magazine praises Madame C. J. Walker for advancing the Afro-American cause through her business success.
If one was looking for an unsparing prose analysis that would seem to match the underlayment of his poetry, this isn’t that. If in his poetry he might aim to be, might be seen as, a Superman — as a Clark Kent he’s not only mild-mannered, he’s not even much of a reporter. I’m somewhat familiar with Republican party positions in this era, and this reads to me to be a restatement of their positions and political platform, with Johnson extending its labor/capital stance to the long-suffering crisis of Black second-class citizenship. The scanned copy that produced the PDF I read captures this piece of marginalia: an author’s dated, handwritten note to the new U. S. Vice President Calvin Coolidge dated Nov. 15, 1920. A stamp a couple of pages in, shows that if this was presented and was to be conveyed in some way to Coolidge, it was passed off to the Harvard University Library on November 27th, only a few days later. I was disappointed at the lack of substance in the book’s contents, but still a little sad to read that once again Johnson’s estimate of his salience was passed off.
Johnson’s handwritten note on the flyleaf of “For the Highest Good.”
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My speculation, my judgement so far with gaps known and unknown: in his poetry Johnson remains the revolutionary he was made out to be. And I am not sure that his public political face represented his thoughts and emotions in totality. Was all this (to simply paraphrase) “I’m here to put my Black shoulder to the wheel to move forward mainstream (Republican) politics” persona just a way to get over, to cross-over, to get him a larger platform (or at least pay the rent?) Or where the more radical critiques portrayed in his poems “man on the street” personas — not representative of Johnson’s own sincere beliefs, but rather warnings of why a more moderate approach must actually produce change?
And there’s another possibility to speculate on: by the middle of the 1920s Johnson’s literary work seems to have gone dark. While there was another, 1920s, poetry collection planned by Johnson that likely extended the work that was printed in Others, it apparently found no publisher, and as of yet I know of no other writings that might show Johnson’s political analysis evolving or uncloaking. The 1930s produced another wave of political consciousness for writers. During that decade he apparently was employed with the New Deal WPA Writer’s project, but this could have been just a way to find a survival income during the Great Depression. Johnson lived past WWII and into the dawn of yet another wave of activism for Afro-American full citizenship. Some of the people who associated with him in the Chicago scene from the Thirties onward, and who were aware of his poetry, had less-accommodationist stances. I’ll plan to talk a little bit about them next time.
Instead of another selection from Fenton Johnson’s poetry, I’ll offer this work of another Afro-American 20th century poet today, one James Marshall Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix gets all his proper respect as a revolutionary of guitar, but way less than he deserves as a songwriter. In his “Up from the Skies” he gives us an Afro-Futurist (or is it Afro-Historicist) monolog about facing a world he’s both a foundational part of and estranged from.**** The LYL Band can’t hope to duplicate Hendrix’s performance, but with this variation we performed last fall on the anniversary of Hendrix’s passing-on, I tried to bring forward the SF story his lyric tells — a story that, as famous as Hendrix genius-electric-guitarist was, was maybe as under-read as Fenton Johnson.
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*James Weldon Johnson was a polymath who among other things was a leading Black civil rights activist of his time, a literary figure himself, and an anthologist who helped make sure Fenton Johnson’s name was recorded as an Afro-American poet of note. Despite the shared last name, they are not related. As far as I know, neither JWJ nor Kreymborg ever met Fenton Johnson much less discussed politics or his poetic aesthetics with him.
I’ll mention here that there is a contemporary author also named Fenton Johnson. I reached out to him yesterday, and he’s aware of the coincidental name, and has even thought of writing a Fenton Johnson on Fenton Johnson piece.
**The early 20th century Republican party shares little but the name with the current political faction. On the matter of Afro-American civil rights it was, however faintly, still “The Party of Lincoln,” and many of the more ardent Black advocates were at least nominally Republicans. They were also the party more associated with business interests, government reform, moral probity and alcohol regulation. At least in his writing, Johnson seems earnestly on the side of moral probity.
One speculation, Johnson may have hoped for a political patronage job either in Chicago or in Washington. His early model, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, had received such an appointment.
***Anyone who’s seen the play or movie The Front Page, the uproarious farce of Chicago newspapering in this era, may remember the inept and corrupt mayor who was worrying about the effect of his stances on the black vote. That’s Thompson in the eyes of Hecht and MacArthur.
****When the wry alien stranger monologist in Hendrix’s song says “I have been here before, in the days of ice,” I wonder if Hendrix, who was aware of his mother’s First Nation’s heritage, was accidently, subconsciously, or intentionally thinking of the ice-age nomads who crossed over into North America. It’s a common trope to wonder what Hendrix the guitar hero would have done if only he’d not suffered the accidental sleeping pill overdose in 1970. May I offer an alternative: what if he’d grown to more fully consider his Afro-American and Indigenous heritage as a writer and Science Fiction aficionado?
Enjoy the Valentine’s candy if you have it, but this is a longer post, and we’re going to get into some uncomfortable stuff with this one. Yes racism, but then I’ll deal today with musicology and Modernist poetry too. The first is deadly in spirit and body, but then the latter two may often bring on the little death of boredom and indifference. This is why I respect you as an audience: poetry is a minority interest, mixing in the variety of musical styles I use here to the best of my subjective abilities will confound some of that audience, and then to discuss oppression — even the resistance to oppression which should be heartening — well, welcome rare, broad, and appreciated readers and listeners. Let us continue.
I said earlier in this year’s Black History Month series where I’m examining the early work of Chicago poet Fenton Johnson, that it may help us to orient ourselves into the time in which this young Black man in his twenties started writing and publishing. If we look at poetry and music, three big things are happening. They’re going to change how the 20th century, and even our own current century, approaches things.
The Fenton Johnson poetry I’ve presented so far this February has been in the 19th century tradition. It’s a style of poetry his school teachers would have taught him,* and like his chief model Paul Laurence Dunbar, he can speak for and about his fellow Afro-Americans using that mode of poetry. However, at this time something new is brewing in poetry. Over in England a small group of ex-pat Americans are joining forces with a couple of British poets/critics and a man from Belfast to create the first Modernist English poetry.** Few are noticing this yet, it takes a couple of years for it to get a foothold, but in 1909 the first poem in a style that would soon take to calling itself “Imagist” was published: “Autumn” by British writer T. E. Hulme.
What makes that poem and the Imagist poems that follow Modernist? First off, it’s concise, it gets to the point. The language may combine things in unexpected ways, but it uses much more ordinary and day-to-day language to do it. Indeed, it revels in that — part of its freshness is that it wants to render sublime moments in the same way of speaking that something utterly mundane might be expressed. Its commitment to this is so strong that those mundane moments, the “unpoetic” ones, can be charged with a power. It doesn’t care to have the people in its poetry seem high-flown, they don’t have to be different more “poetic” creatures. Yet these same poems often have an important core of distrust for common or worn-out appreciations of reality. Emotions may be stated, yes, but many of the most vivid poems portray the landscape and the palpable things surrounding an emotion rather than hang signposts or explanatory placards of their feelings. Rhyme and meter could be used, but they aren’t the main point if they lead the poet to ignore these new things to emphasize.
While this is going on, Black Americans are forging a couple of new musical forms that are going to overthrow their nation’s music — and from there, impact the world’s. Because this happened before the full emergence of commercial music recording, some of this is literally un-recorded. Buddy Bolden and his like are playing instrumental music largely sounded on brass-band instruments along with pianos, where access to those instruments is available. Eventually that will be called Jazz. Many mark the first Jazz record as being issued in 1917, though Jazz existed before the recording.
At roughly the same time various strains of music with lyrics made by Afro-Americans are being extracted and refined from the ore of American folk music. I would maintain that the lyrical part of this sung music can be viewed as Afro-American Modernism. The songs love to get to the point of things, stripping away hypocrisy and pretense. They deal with disappointment and sadness, yes, but they most often deal with it in resiliency and wry resistance. Taking from the preexisting tactics of folk musics, they will borrow and reference each other’s individual songs — and like Modernism will soon take to doing, they will collage together unlike things and verses to jump from incident to incident. That sung music will eventually be called Blues, and because it’s a sung music, any instrument can be used for accompaniment, including cheap and portable ones. No Blues? No rock’n’roll, no country music as we came to know it, no rap.*** The first Blues recordings were done in the 1920s, but the first sheet music which might be classed as Blues dates to 1912, though again we know it existed unrecorded and off the books before this.
So, three things — all big, culture shaping stuff. In 1900 there’s no general cultural knowledge that these three things exist: English-language Literary Modernism, Jazz, and Blues. By the 1920s they all become part of the mainstream culture, however misinterpreted and misrepresented they may be. Modernist poetry might be thought of as self-consciously crude esoteric nonsense sticking its thumb into the eye of real poetic verse, while Jazz was thought of as hopped-up fast-tempo music to deaden the mind as rapidly as cheap liquor might, and Blues? That’s merely sad and sentimental music of resignation to fate.
This is Fenton Johnson’s world as a young man. The Harlem Renaissance writers that would come a decade or so later would still be dealing with this world. As we’ve seen in previous Black History Month series here, the Black cultural leaders of the first part of the 20th century were not yet fully on-board with Jazz or Blues, which they often felt reflected badly on their race. They did briefly note Fenton Johnson as a Black Modernist free-verse poet, but this happened in the Twenties as Johnson was withdrawing from writing new verse.
I was thinking of this as I read Johnson’s first collection of poems, no doubt written in the years before the book’s publication in 1913, and I come upon this short poem, “Mistah Witch” printed in the phonetic dialect meant to represent unlettered Afro-American speech.
Here’s how it appeared published in Fenton Johnson’s “A Little Dreaming” in 1913
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What matter of word music is this? I used my musicological knowledge along with literary thoughts as I examined it. It could be a folk-origin nursery rhyme or play song.*** It could just be a short supernatural poem, for we’ve seen last time that fantasy poems were a genre Johnson touched on in his more conventional verse. It may just be me, but I couldn’t help but read it as Blues Poetry — and a very early example of it too.
No, as printed it doesn’t use the Blues’ 12-bar structure or the three-line (two refrained or near refrained lines, and a response in the third line) stanza. Blues has never been purist about that, and early Blues often didn’t fit into regular musical forms. But I got a Blues sensibility from it. Mistah Witch may be mythologically, potentially, or actually, frightening, but the poem’s speaker seems to know Mistah Witch’s game, how he operates. I thought the poem’s sharpest line was (translated from the phonetic dialect) “Ain’t you tired of scaring me?” That implies Mistah Witch’s “magic” terror is weakening out of boredom and the rote nature of it for the speaker!
If Blues, like other Modernist poetry, likes to get to the point of things, it can also enjoy encoding its statements. The tactic is often: I’m going to speak something publicly, and part of the audience (the ones I want to let know we share an outlook) will get what I’m saying — while at the same time those that might not approve of my statement will be in the dark about what I’m talking about. The latter will just be puzzled or indifferent to what they don’t understand.
What could be encoded in “Mistah Witch?”
In plain talk: from the days of Fenton Johnson’s youth, through the years he began publishing his poetry, and continuing after his poetic work faded away, there was beside the slow incremental wear-and-tear of stereotypes and “civilized” discrimination an active and brutal threat of terroristic violence against Black Americans. Threats, attacks, lynching and (white) race riots are a part of American history that wasn’t talked about broadly out of a mixture of shame and “politeness.” ***** Blues doesn’t play that game, but a Blues singer (or a poet looking to find a broader audience) might encode a protest against that terror metaphorically. I did note that the poem concludes with telling us that Mistah Witch (“Mistah” signifying the frightener is someone the singer feels they must make a show of social respect to) has eyes like the sea — the bluest eye perhaps.
I’m not certain if that’s what Fenton Johnson is doing in “Mistah Witch,” perhaps even unconsciously. I am planning to try to include some information that I have recently learned about Johnson’s political views later in this series. Musically I took Johnson’s original poem, and for this performance turned it more toward an irregular folk-Blues structure to reflect the Blues sensibility I saw in the poem.
And for those who want a little time-machine technical magic to travel back to those early Blues recordings often pressed cheaply for the “race records” market and worn with dust and the needles of heavy-armed Victrolas, I’ve included a Bonus Track today: a simulation of how the recording would sound in that context.
Here’s my rough’n’ready musical performance of Fenton Johnson’s “Mistah Witch” recorded with inexpensive modern equipment.
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Here’s the simulated worn 78 RPM shellac record version.
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*Johnson, unlike most Americans and even more so, most non-white Americans, had a first-rate college education, attending Northwestern and the University of Chicago.
**This group coalescing before the start of WWI included T. E. Hulme, from the less fashionable north of England who’d been expelled from Cambridge, F. S. Flint a self-made man of letters who risen from Victorian poverty, the Americans T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Pound’s former college sweetheart Hilda Doolittle, as well as Robert Frost, and the somewhat forgotten man from Belfast was Joseph Campbell. I count Frost as a Modernist, as I see his poetry aligning in its outlook with Hulme’s theories, differences in prosody aside. Remaining in America, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Edgar Lee Masters would also be early Modernists.
***Jazz musicians will often maintain that the Blues is essential to Jazz as well. In that sense, my reading is that they aren’t just talking about Blues musical structures and vocal inflections portrayed by instruments, but the Blues sensibility.
****Blues could and did use lines shared with those folk music forms.
*****In 1919 Johnson’s Chicago suffered a mass racially motivated riot. In 1909 downstate Illinois had a similar incident in Springfield. Smaller acts of terrorism against Afro-Americans were continuous in Johnson’s time. Black History Month isn’t just about that, history shouldn’t be a flat picture. That stuff is ugly — it was meant to be so — and that ugliness is part of the reason it was suppressed and untaught. But. But. But — you can’t fully comprehend the beauty of resistance to that without knowing the ugliness it opposed.
“Mistah Witch” in my reading is racism, or white-supremacist terror in general, and it could be specifically referencing the original Klan terrorists who fancied themselves in their costumes as representing murderous ghosts and spirits.
Is there anyone reading this far in these posts today mumbling to themselves “It’s Black History Month — and instead of the eclectic variety I expect from the Parlando Project, Frank is giving us this little-known early-20th century Black Chicago poet, this Fenton Johnson guy (who, huh)?”
Let’s keep you here, because Johnson is bringing the variety again today, with a piece that could pass for early William Butler Yeats, or someone else from the Celtic Revival that was happening contemporarily with Johnson’s first poetry collection A Little Dreaming of 1913. And if our last piece of Johnson’s that had the Roman underworld didn’t warn you, this one is further into the dark fantasy/horror poetry genre as well.
Wraiths and wights, two names given to the wicked messenger in today’s poem have been popularized by later, fantasy books — Tolkien and Rowling et al. But Yeats and others in the Celtic Revival touched on various kinds of supernatural spirits around the time of Fenton Johnson. The non-human beings in these dealings were often at least chaotic or untrustworthy — and as a class, wraiths tended to be even more so. Though named as fairies, not wraiths, I’ve recently presented two linked fairy poems by Yeatsand Robert Frost for example where the fairy is seeking to trick a human couple so that they can abduct one of them to fairyland.
Don’t stay up late reading blogs, for a wraithie might visit you
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In Johnson’s “The Wraithie’s Message” the poem’s initial speaker beholds a marvelous creature made of “living flame” at his window. The creature tells our mortal, who the wraith addresses as “dreamer” that there is a lovely sea-side woman, the dreamer’s soul’s desire, who he has beguiled with “burning song” so that this woman is now dreaming of, desirous of, our dreamer.
The dreamer at the window is all in on this. He sees not an untrustworthy wraith in this apparition of living flame, but a “good elf” who might be of service to humans. And besides, as the poem ends, he explains that this dreamer is tired of his dreams — ones that have not been realized. What really awaits? In my understanding of this poem, the wraithie is a siren by proxy. The promised maiden may be by “the deathless sea,” but that may be in the sense that the enthralled or the dead have no more dying to do.
Should it surprise us that a young Black Chicagoan is writing this poem? Perhaps a little, but it shouldn’t be a lot. I come from the Midwestern city of Prince Rogers Nelson after all. Versatility with many styles has been demonstrated by Black Americans over and over. In regard to Afro-American musicians, I lost my constrained surprise decades ago when I learned that Fenton Johnson’s early 20th century contemporaries, Blues musicians —who I prized for their distinctive “authentic” recorded music — had a wider repertoire and spread of influences than I had guessed, and that they were often capable of essaying a variety of white ethnic styles with aplomb.*
But the choice of this Celtic Revival flavor by Johnson may not have been entirely random. Remember that last time Johnson was trying on the title of “bard,” and a bard for a generation of Black Americans who were trying to propagate an Afro-American culture of achievement and distinction — not just out of some parochial ethnic pride, but out of a very serious need to establish their humanity in a country that still retained nearly its full measure of white supremacy. The Celtic Revival of Johnson’s time was similarly seeking to present themselves as full human beings by displaying a rich culture, and it’s not unlikely that Johnson was seeing what he could appreciate and adopt from that.
With a Celtic myth via an Afro-American, there is after all a story here of a despairing dreamer and an untrustworthy power willing to trick them to their doom.
Simple guitar chords, but my recorded version will sound different because I used a CGDGBE tuning
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I had planned to do this Fenton Johnson piece this month, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m nearly always unsure of what time and focus I will have to do these pieces now. I had written a sketch of the music already (that helps) and in the middle of the day today I was able to try it out. It came together so quickly I was able to complete a basic track before attending a Canadian Zoom salon featuring friend of this blog Robert Okaji reading new poems. Then later tonight I finished mixing it, leaving it simple enough, though I hope it’s effective. This is another piece that may depend a great deal on my vocal abilities “of a subjective quality” — but that’s up to you the listener. You can hear my musical setting of “The Wraithie’s Message” with the audio gadget below. No player? A substitute can be summoned with this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Some might be wondering if Fenton Johnson utilized or valued Afro-American music and modes. Yes indeed — he was early and effective in that, a decade before those in the Harlem Renaissance did similar things. I’ve got a couple of pieces planned demonstrating that yet this month.
Though poetry might aim for timelessness, time as we know it aims to hide itself in the past. For that reason, when I talk about Fenton Johnson this month, I want you to be able to step inside his time a bit. Depending on your expectations for poetry, or poetry by Black Americans, some of the elements of his poetry might seem out-of-place, but Johnson didn’t have the ability to see us — an audience of today — instead he was addressing the expectations of his time.
From reading Johnson’s first collection of poetry, 1913’s A Little Dreaming it’s clear that one of Johnson’s chief models was Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar was born in 1872, Johnson in 1888. Depending on how you think of the amorphous boundaries of generations, the two are bookends of one generation or a generation apart, but two facts are important to understand in this relationship.
The leading fact? Dunbar was proudly counted as the first Afro-American poet to reach some level of general recognition. How well recognized was Dunbar in Johnson’s time? I can’t say for sure. Some established white critics reviewed his work. Public reading tours were advertised, indicating that there may have been expectations of greater than the folding-chairs in bookstore-aisles readings common for poets today. Part of Dunbar’s potential audience would be something new: an emerging Black American cohort born post-slavery who could read. Their parents might have been enslaved (as Dunbar’s were), and now they had this new broad skill, and they were allowed to indulge in it.* What was it they would read? Newspapers & magazines for sure. The popular press was growing during this time — and it was somewhat analogous to the Internet today, including the breadth of materials and parochial opinions, not all of them on the up and up. Novels and prose books? They were around, some inexpensive editions aimed at the less-wealthy casual reader’s budget. Poetry? Likely closely related to the availability of novels. Does that surprise any of you? In the Dunbar/Johnson pre-WWI era poetry was more a co-equal branch of literature than today. In our early part of our 21st century, open the books section of one of the big city American newspapers, and it’ll be rare to see any notice of new poetry collections. A literary author interviewed on TV is an increasingly uncommon event, but such guests will almost always be novelists. If you were to walk into a bookstore this year, how likely would you see poetry collections prominently displayed to tempt the general shopper?
I have no time machine to visit a circa-1900 bookstore, but my reading of the Dunbar/Johnson era indicates that to readers and the commercial side of publishing then, poetry was not consigned to a specialist interest of a small coterie of folks. Poets like Longfellow and Tennyson were as famous to the ordinary reader, if not more so, than many of the American novelists you might be asked to read in an American Lit survey course today. And there were contemporary, living, popular North American poets who were read by a general public then too: John Witcomb Riley, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Bliss Carmen, Robert W. Service, and Edgar Guest emerge in this era. All these poets had a general audience, even if these once popular poets might not be covered in an academic survey course today.
So, Dunbar’s intended audience was broad, general. Some of his writing followed the same formal structure and practices used by the most esteemed poets of the 19th century, but not all of it. To a Black audience he may have intended to capture the newly literate while also offering a more serious solace and uplift for these men and women only recently granted rights on paper. To potential white readers of his time a parallel intent: poems at the casual entertaining level to put them at ease, but then poems in elevated literary modes expressing the beautiful thoughts in a Black man’s head or the pressing problems he and his race are encountering.
A young poet today might aim for a published collection, likely with an academic or specialist small publisher. Might aim for poetry awards watched mostly by other poets. Might aim for a teaching position. In the Dunbar/Johnson era it may have seemed possible for a poet to aim for a deeper/wider presence than today in both the literary and popular sense.
How far did Dunbar get in accomplishing that? My understanding, subject to correction from better scholarship, was that he became “Black famous.” His efforts would have been known and recognized by more-educated and culturally ambitious Black Americans, even if he would have been unlikely to be known to my (white) grandparents. To Black literary writers, whatever size that group was? He seems to have been huge.
Which brings us to the second important Dunbar fact. Dunbar died young: 33 years old, in 1906. Johnson would have been 18 and was about to go to college. If you were Afro-American, a poet, and interested in furthering the prestige of your culture in the first part of the 20th century, Dunbar was the man to consider. That Dunbar had fallen, still not meeting his highest expectations, could be seen as a standard bearer staggered short of the wall, but another young poet could pick up the flag and carry it further.
Once again, here’s a chord sheet for those who’d like to sing this themselves.
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Long time readers here may recall that another of Johnson’s Afro-American poetic contemporaries, Anne Spencer, wrote a short poem linking the died-young Dunbar with early 19th century British Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley. Today’s piece from Fenton Johnson is a poem with similar goals. Johnson’s “Dunbar” is just 12 lines itself, but it makes a concise case for Dunbar’s broad worth. In a refrain at the end of each stanza he calls Dunbar “bard” to indicate that he as a poet is representing his culture, and Johnson is particularly interested in bringing forward that Dunbar can do the serious and be a “Bard of grief and woe” but that also he is the “Bard of happiness.” In this claim for Dunbar’s worth in comedy and tragedy he may be exceeding Spencer’s claims for Dunbar — as this best for comedy and tragedy claim echoes one made for Shakespeare.
What does Johnson mean when he writes that Dunbar’s poems were “sung in accents?” Dunbar’s rhymed metrical verse would use standard English (including a willingness to use elevated “poetic diction”). Johnson would begin doing the same. Dunbar also wrote in dialect: poems where the language is meant to portray less-educated speakers, is written in colloquial grammar, and is printed in phonetic approximations of heavy accents. Dialect was a literary vogue in the late 19th century in both prose and poetry. Of the popular poets mentioned above, John Whitcomb Riley, specialized in dialect poems reflecting common-man white speech of the rural Midwest. Dunbar wrote a poem in praise of Riley, Riley wrote a letter complimentary to Dunbar. Modern readers may have an inescapable problem with this sounding like minstrelsy.** And there is correspondence from Dunbar where he wrote that he was increasingly troubled by what he saw as the greater acceptance of the dialect poems. Fenton Johnson may not have known of that, and Johnson would also write in dialect in the mode of Dunbar.
I said at the start of this Black History Month that Fenton Johnson was a bridge between Dunbar and the Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes. At the beginning of his writing Johnson is clearly on the Dunbar side of that bridge, so this poem in praise of Dunbar — now song with the addition of my music — is a good place to start. You can hear it with the audio player below, and if that player isn’t there, with this backup highlighted link which will open a new page with its own audio player.
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*Dunbar’s mother Matilda was born enslaved and illiterate. She worked as a domestic servant after emancipation and took night classes to learn to read. There are stories that she had her children teach her ABCs, perhaps with the dual utility of drilling them while helping teach herself! Paul began writing poetry as a schoolchild, and she encouraged him and organized the family to allow Paul to complete high school. Paul Laurence Dunbar died so young that he was survived by his mother who lived until 1934.
**Bothers me too, and not just because it seems belittling even when it is only so by association with racist beliefs. I have little to no facility for reading or reproducing phonetic speech for some reason.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is most often introduced as the first successful Afro-American poet, and I guess I’ve just followed form by starting this post that way. That statement is more-or-less true. I’d suppose a case could be made for the primacy of Phillis Wheatley who published a book of poems with some notice in the 18th century even before American Independence. And then too, there’s the question of success levels. Dunbar was able to publish more than a dozen books, got praised by some white literary critics and established poets. Figures in Afro-American culture put him forward as a leading Black poetic voice: Frederic Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, pioneering Black orchestral composers William Grant Still and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
As noted in Anne Spencer’s elegant short eulogy poem linking him with other died-young poets, Dunbar was only 33 when he died. Carl Sandburg was just 6 years younger than Dunbar, Robert Frost was but two years younger — both of those poets survived into the 1960s. Dunbar died in 1906 after being debilitated by illness and a series of personal crises. By the time the Harlem Renaissance came around to start making Afro-American artists chic, Dunbar was more than a decade dead. How much more growth and new circumstances could have accrued for Dunbar!
That we still remember him, that a couple of his poems, “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy (I know why the caged bird sings),” survive to be widely read and considered, should be counted as a success.* “The Sparrow” is not as well-known, but I’d note that it both comments on the Afro-American experience and a more generalized human experience.**
“The Sparrow” is a poem about being sent joy, being sent song, being offered the peace of fellowship, being offered something — and being too callous, or too ignorant, or too busied with the things that aren’t joy and song. In the course of this poem, it may be simply drudgery that is keeping the poem’s singer from noting the bird. Even non-unpleasant rote life can obscure those offered gifts. And oh yes, oh yes, it can be fear and prejudice that shuts them out too.
Guitar chord sheet for those that want that want to perform my song setting of Dunbar’s poem.
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Beyond his remembered poems, I think often of Dunbar’s own life as a sheaf of strong metaphors. His mother was born enslaved. Sensing somehow that her son had a talent as a child, she herself learned to read to help him along, so that eventually that son wrote of that caged bird and of today’s offering sparrow. After publishing his first poetry collection, Dunbar sold it while working at his job as an elevator operator in his hometown of Dayton Ohio. He would offer it to his passengers migrating a few floors up or down inside his elevator cage.*** He grew up in Dayton with a couple of bicycle mechanics, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Orville was his school classmate and helped Dunbar find a publisher for that poetry collection. After eventually attaining some notice for his poetry and public readings of it, Dunbar got a job in the Library of Congress. Around that time his mortal illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis. I read today that he thought the dust of the books in the library made him — the man who could once charm musicians with the way his poetry sung off the page — choke and cough. He descended into his illness and depression for the foreshortened rest of his life. Three years before he succumbed, those bike mechanics made and flew the first airplane, and some of mankind slipped the surly bonds.
Someone had to be the first men to compose flight — but flying or caged, we need to sing, need to hear the singer, even after they’ve flown away. As Dunbar’s “The Sparrow” has it in its ending line we often “Know not our loss till they are gone.”
I composed the music for Dunbar’s poem earlier this week, and dedicated much of today to completing the arrangement you can hear below with the audio player you may see below. No player? This highlighted link will open a new page with its own player so that you can hear it. You may notice that I changed a few words in Dunbar’s poem while singing it. Some of the longer sentences didn’t give the song (or at least this singer) enough space for breath — and where rhyme didn’t demand it, I unconsciously changed a couple bits of the 19th century poetic diction as I strove to bring out the poems meaning as I sung it. That’s generally considered a fault in classical song settings, but I come from a looser folk songwriting tradition where that sort of thing is allowed. Here’s a link to the poem as Dunbar published it with all his words and syntax intact.
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*To be known for a single poem, to have that carried by others, even in part, in reader’s memory, is an achievement I’d say. I can remember having a discussion with Kevin FitzPatrick some years back when he put forward that Dylan Thomas should be weighed by only being known for one poem — or maybe just that one poem’s refrain. That’s an arguable assessment, but even accepting that, that’s more than many poets, including prize winning-poets, achieve years after their death.
**In dealing with Autism Spectrum Disorder I often think of Dunbar’s poem of Black code-switching to seek acceptance or protection from mainstream white culture, and apply it to the ASD tactic of “masking” to seem more neurotypical. Dunbar’s caged bird never has to say it’s a metaphor for Afro-American experience to Black folks, but caged hopes are not an exclusive experience. I’ll split hairs on thin ice to mix those metaphors re: cultural appropriation vs. cross-over impact.
***Further risking flippancy on my part, it could be argued that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, but the enterprising Paul Laurence Dunbar invented the elevator pitch.
A lot of the poetry I combine with music here was published around 100 years ago, making it clearly in the public domain for reuse. Given my age, some of the poetry from the Previous Twenties doesn’t seem all that old — after all, many of the poets’ lives overlapped mine — but some poets and poems look back, as I do now from my 2020s, to older styles of poetic expression, ones from an additional 100 years before the 1920s poet. That may be too much for some younger audiences I think.
Since poetry is at least partly about how something is said, it’s not out of line for style to be substantial when we choose to read or listen to poetry — but, sometimes we might choose to “translate” poetry for performance to make it more immediate.
Here’s an example. I came upon this 1922 poem by Claude McKay while looking for summer poems. I’ve presented McKay a few times already here. A figure stored away in the Tupperware container labeled The Harlem Renaissance, McKay’s poetry is still preserved and sometimes read — often the portion of his poems that speak eloquently about racism and the double alienation of being a Black Caribbean emigrant to the United States. Since these things are still factors in the 2020s, that supplies relevance to continue to consider them. A poem like his 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die,”however formal in prosody, presents clear reasons to our current ears.
But McKay is also a passionate love poet.* Now, to say the least, love is still a contemporary experience, so one might think his love poetry would also get more contemporary exposure. My casual estimate says this hasn’t happened. Yet.
Why not? This poem is significantly old-fashioned, 19th-century-like. Its sentences are poetic in an outdated style, they don’t flow casually in a spoken way. This is a style we might forgive in 19th-century verse if written back then, particularly if the poem is a Hall-of-Fame, “Poetry’s Greatest Hits,” poem — but not so much for a 20th century poet’s less honored selection.
Don’t make the mistake when reading old poetry to think that the poets must be old too. McKay was just 30 when he first published this poem.
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This poem also makes a mistake writers can fall into. McKay seems to think that leaving a surprise for the ending will strengthen the poem — that when the reader finally sees that surprise they will be happy to have waited for the poem’s context.
There are poems that work that way.** To me, this one doesn’t. Coming upon it, one may not read through the facile but not necessarily compelling nature poem that makes up more than ¾ of the text. Therefore, in my “translation” for today’s performance, I’ve decided to create a refrain out of the poem’s final line, spoiling the surprise but urging the listener to consider the nature and weather report portions of this poem as reports of human desire and inner weather. You’ll hear how it works in the musical performance you can hear below.
Taking liberties like this is one reason I use public domain work: it’s now free for one to do with it what one wants. If you want to read McKay’s work as he intended it, here’s a link to the 1922 version. That link includes its own link to an even earlier published version by McKay, evidence that the poem’s author himself was trying to improve his poem’s impact.
Writers: if you are ever writing a surprise-ending piece, if you ever are withholding something from your reader or listener because you think it’ll be a grand or witty “Aha!” moment at the end, consider the alternative. The alternative here, the bringing out the key context that the poem’s speaker is viewing his summer night and morning “Blind with hunger for your love,” strengthens listener engagement I think, and it lets the listener see that the speaker/singer is just as attracted to the early rain-storm, sleepless-night portion of the weather, as the “miracle” of the subsequent sunny morning which is so incongruent with their present feelings. I’ve doubled down on that revision by making the newly refrained line the title too. ”Summer Morn in New Hampshire,” as McKay titled it, is too specific yet generic in my hindsight judgement.
I did my best with the musical performance of this as a song. I enjoyed playing my big, heavy, 20-plus-year-old 12-string Guild guitar and weaving in the rest of a quartet of ringing and raining instruments. It’s not a humble-brag, but a statement of the song’s potential to say that this piece would benefit from a higher-skilled singer than I am. Perhaps my voice’s approximations can be heard as bringing an imperfect human immediacy to the words? You can hear the performance with a graphic audio player below (if you see that). No player? This is a hyperlink that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Let me leave this final point to a footnote. Best as can be determined, Claude McKay’s erotic connections seem to have been with men. Given the homophobia of his time — or perhaps from artistic choice — McKay has written this poem, as he has many of his love poems, in an entirely genderless manner.
**This poem isn’t a sonnet, but it is “sonnet-ish,” and the popular English/Shakespearean sonnet conventionally expects a somewhat surprising summation in its final couplet.
Frank Hudson 