The modern kings will throttle you to greet the piping voice of artificial birds

February 26, 2026February 26, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a new Claude McKay poem song setting, “To a Poet,” completed as part of my concentration on his poetry this February. Somewhat of a “deep cut” in McKay’s poetry, but as sometimes happens when reading a bunch of poems, there was one set of lines that stood out as I read this pioneering Jamaican-American poet’s work. I’ll get to those lines, but first a detour about the music.

Which is something I don’t write much here. The Parlando Project started as a musical idea, though I always thought I’d want to say something about the experience of encountering the poems on the way to making the music, and so this blog. While true engagement with the blog posts here is hard to judge – something made harder by occasional bouts of what appear to be bots skimming (and reskimming) posts here since last autumn – there’s been a satisfying and unrelenting increase in visits to this blog over 10 years. Blogs may no longer be the new-hot, but the visits keep coming. Thank you, readers, and I wish that my personality and situation would allow me to be more attentive to your comments.* I treasure anyone that spends a little time here.

But the musical pieces, the cause of this all? They get no more listens than they did only a few years into this Project when monthly readership and listening numbers were roughly equal – while presently listeners are maybe 10% of the numbers of readers. I’m realistic about the limitations of my musical expression. I’m about as far from a poptomist composer as could be imagined, and I’ve long feared that not sticking to one style of music creates what used to be called by radio programmers “button pushers” – those who hear one or two songs they strongly dislike and decide to go elsewhere. I understand, people react to music sensually, emotionally, and so a bad experience with music creates a stronger distaste than a duff blog post or the choice of a poem some don’t care for – but my music making reflects my listening, it’s eclectic. I’m committed to musical adventurousness and variety, and so by intent or missteps the music may not always be something you’d choose. I don’t believe I’d enjoy this Project if it was anything else.

But one musical constraint has always been with me: my singing voice and its take it or leave it limitations. Spoken word poetry, even with integrated music, is one thing, and I’ll do that, but some words tell me they expect to be sung, and almost always, that means the singer is me. I’m grateful for the times my long-time LYL bandmate Dave Moore has given me and my listeners a break, and there have been scattered other “guest vocalists” over the decade. Today’s song is different. I wanted to do something (however simplified, as I think simplified music retains powers) more like Art Song, the composed music that features trained singers who express strong melodic contours through skilled techniques, rather than off-the-cuff, I’ll-give-it-a-go, folk-singing.

Go ahead, scroll down and listen to today’s piece setting to music the words of Claude McKay. I’ll wait. And here’s the text of McKay’s poem that was performed with my music.

OK, you’re back. Who’s the guest vocalist? The stage name is Felicia. Felicia is a virtual instrument. Readers here may recall what that is, but I think it’s important to reiterate: a VI is often a set of atomized recorded samples of a real “acoustic” instrument, a whole range of notes with articulations expressing a range of colors. Let’s not confuse two-letter-acronyms, VI is not AI as expressed by services like Suno which take an overall text description of the nature of a song and create in one fell swoop the finished melodic lines of the singer (and all their arrangement and accompaniment) by apparently recombining conventional musical materials. If I take a VI of, for example an organ, and invoke it on my computer it won’t play a toccata, early Phillip Glass, or “Rock Lobster,” or anything like those pieces, no matter how I write a run-on requesting sentence about it. It instead needs me to play my MIDI guitar or little plastic keyboard, or inscribe notes on a MIDI piano roll notation. I could (as a very limited keyboardist) invoke arpeggiators or chord and pattern generators to extend what I play or write – but it still feels like composition to me. In contrast, AI like Suno feels like I’m a royal patron asking my musicians for some conventional musical noise to underscore my cultural pretenses, caring only that it be inoffensive.

Another difference: even a despot likely paid their court musicians something. AI? Not so much. The company that sells the Felicia voice VI (Dreamtronics) claims it pays the human singers that it samples to make its products.

Still, I expect this revelation, or its implementation in this piece, will repel some listeners. The spirals inside the ear have their own Uncanny Valley, and I too feel that fearful symmetry. It sounds like a human putting artifice onto itself or an artifice taunting the qualities of human. I put up with it because I had a goal, and my voice could never sing with the VI’s technique, particularly over a longer piece. I played the vocal line on my little plastic keyboard, and typed each syllable as text that the notes would sing. Early vocal VIs were very picky about needing explicit phonetic text, but this one knows much more about the baroque tangles of English pronunciation, yet I still had to tweak some syllables. The program has a range of controls for expression variations – learning how to use them will improve results – but it presents default expressive choices that keep the monotonous spiel of old-school robot speech away.**

Felicia made it much easier to get something that wasn’t fakey bad or unintelligible as older vocal VIs I’ve tried, even as I still felt the need to do work to improve problematic passages. It took me several hours to create the vocal line realization you hear in today’s piece. A trained human singer at the mic could have done it in an hour, even including leeway for retakes and “try it this ways.”

One thing I noticed: even when I had polished up the intelligibility of the VI sung text, the meaning of the words seemed abstracted to me as a listener. Oddly, this is the same thing I sometimes hear as a listener with Art Song, where the composer’s elaborate melodies or the singer’s concentration on demonstrating virtuoso technique make the words vehicles for expressing music more than shared experience. Human vocalists singing Art Song, in their own way, produce their own unsettling Uncanny Valley.

Which may bring up the question, why not just use a real singer? Yes, that would be better. I, who am socially awkward, not able to schedule a time to do my creative work, and heading-up a non-revenue Project can say that would be an ideal, but unlikely, option. Furthermore, in the process of composition I wouldn’t be able to test my musical choices as a limited singer, so there’d likely never be a score for such a singer to follow.***

Will I use a vocal VI again here? Likely, though I don’t think I’ll use it most of the time, or even often. My voice is my voice, and I feel I should use it. Still, I was very happy that I could realize this musical piece. Through the technology of VIs I was also able to play the atomic recombinations of an oboe, a viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy as part of the accompaniment.

OK, so back to Claude McKay’s poem. Like his “When I Have Passed Away” from earlier this month, McKay’s poem here speaks of posthumous poetic legacy. In the context of this month while using a computer VI to sing his words, I was much taken with the pair of lines in his poem: “The modern kings will throttle you to greet/The piping voice of artificial birds.” Maybe 100-years-ago, a prophetic McKay knew how I’d come to try to make a song of his poem using a voice of artifice under the rule of a disordered king and assorted technological barons.

You’ve already heard that song haven’t you? What, you didn’t obey the words and stop partway for the music? You’re a rebel! An outlaw! A traitor! You have one – no, two – more chances to hear my musical setting of “To a Poet:” with the audio player you should see below, or with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*Besides mundane life-chores, these increasing problems are partly from aging, and partly secondary to the folks I share my home and life with. It’s hard for me to devote regular and predictable time to this Project, and when opportunity time comes, my nature is to work on finding new words and creating the musical pieces. For some reason (aging? self-doubt?) it’s increasingly hard for me to make the social small-talk that should be trivial and expected.

**I doubt this variation of expression is heavy duty AI either. For a long time VIs have used a pseudo-random cycle of expression variations as an option in their programs. I didn’t get a sense the VI generally knew from the denotative sense of a word or placement in a sentence or musical phrase to give it a particular kind of invocation.

***A product like this, it seems to me, would be ideal for a composer who doesn’t sing well and who would like to rough out scores before an actual performance, as it might give a better quick approximation than just playing the vocal line’s notes on a piano for instance, just as orchestral composers are increasingly roughing out arrangements on other virtual instruments.

Claude McKay’s “After the Winter”

February 22, 2026February 22, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I have no direct information, but I experienced today’s Claude McKay poem as a companion piece to the poem I performed last time, “To Winter.” “ To Winter’s” voice was somber and alone, and the sparseness of winter is welcomed within the moment of that poem. “After the Winter” in contrast leaves a present cold weather moment quickly and turns instead to a hopeful warm weather reverie. Here’s a link to the text of today’s other winter poem.

As I’ve already mentioned in this series, McKay’s poetry often includes flowers, and so it is with this one. I casually compared McKay to Emily Dickinson in this regard – and they are two poets who studied plants scientifically but also portray their aesthetic beauty in poems – but Dickinson’s flowers can often be philosophical, creatures of a searching, perhaps existential, mind, while McKay’s blossoms are flagrantly sensuous.

Not by clay and wattles made.

In the poem here, like my present February in northern America,* is still in winter, and any early birds are shivering, but in the reverie, there’s a bee among the flowers, just as we might find in Dickinson. Yet, as I read this poem I thought of another poet that McKay’s poem could be in conversation with: William Butler Yeats.

Tribute, coincidence? One more thing I don’t know, but as I read “After the Winter” I strongly felt its resonance with Yeats famous “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” ** If McKay was thinking of his homeland of Jamaica, and Yeats of Ireland, the catalog of objects in their pair of poems sing harmonies: a built cabin and a cottage; bean rows and blue bells; bee loud and droning bees in a pair of glades; lapping lake water and laughing crystal rills. One difference in McKay’s cabin vs. Yeats’? Yeats dreams of living there alone, while McKay’s poem speaks of a “we” there.

Am I charging McKay with some crime of unoriginality? Nope. If he’d read and enjoyed Yeats poem (something I think likely) there’s in my world of poetry and song no harm in adding his own verses longing for his own homeland. Poets and singers do this. No less than a Robert Frost did his own reply to a lyrical passage from one of Yeats plays. Folk singers, folk musicians make a practice of this. This thing you’re reading, the Parlando Project? I’m borrowing from poets across the ages and places, singing or performing their words in my way, sometimes altering them intentionally or otherwise. If I sing a more than 100-year-old poem written by a Black Jamaican born in the 19^th century, I’m adding myself, my inhabitation to it. If a Jamaican recalling in his deep heart’s core his rural childhood home while standing in another, colder country, sings along with an Irishman standing on urban pavement in London? That’s us, that’s our shared humanity, hearing and taking in each other’s songs.

How did I inhabit McKay’s poem musically? A predominate instrument sound in my performance is a Middle-Eastern santur, the ancestor of the hammered dulcimer of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn. And I finish the performance by indulging in an electric guitar solo played on a Telecaster: the country & western instrument designed by a one-eyed American. You can hear that with the audio player below. No audio player to be seen with either eye? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing it, so I offer this highlighted link that will open its own tab with an audio player.

*I was able to replace my dead LCD screen today. If you dream about a quiet bucolic place were you can hear bees and gentle breezes rustling some botany, I would suggest not going to a Microcenter on a Sunday. On the other hand, it’s good that there is such a bazaar beside the “pavements grey” where you can find a necessary cable to go from mini display port to full-sized display port.

**Yeats’ poem is famous for its invocation of Ireland, yet I found out in researching it for a Parlando Project performance of it some years back that it was written in London.

Late February, repairs, and Claude McKay’s “To Winter”

February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My winter has been impacted by things a regime of some coarsely-ground humans brewed up, but it’s been good this February to take a quick dive into the poetry of early 20^th century Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. Yesterday I was closing in on completing a new musical piece in my series combining McKay’s poems with original music in differing styles. I’d sung McKay’s “To Winter” accompanied this time by electric guitar instead of acoustic, and I had constructed some nice harmonic support from spare MIDI piano. I wanted a melodic top line though since my rough-hewn singing wasn’t doing enough to carry that role in the song. I decided to use a Mellotron virtual instrument.* Long-timers here may recall that I love some of the sounds that cranky mechanical 1960s tape-based sampler produces. Back then they were sold because it used actual recordings of real instruments – but the results? They didn’t sound all that convincing – and all that machinery was subject to glitches and breakdowns. However, once one stops aiming for verisimilitude, its sounds have a certain character. It probably doesn’t hurt that their very cheesiness brings back memories of crackling mid-century LPs and hazy concerts.

I was able to record those Mellotron parts, but my city was filling with heavy wet snow while I did that.

Authoritarianism of a meteorological kind as it accumulated, but I had another task for Wednesday. My newly inherited 12-year-old car had a worn drive shaft that needed replacing. I was to drop it off at a mechanic’s shop in a nearby suburb, and my wife had set a time to give me a ride back. She wanted to go right away, as the roads were getting worse from the snow. Long story short, what would have normally been a 45-minute round trip turned into over two hours of slow going.

It was later Wednesday evening when I returned to mix the resulting new and old tracks for the song in my home office, and I couldn’t get my home office Mac to light up my computer screen. First thought: a normal glitch, as the Mac sometimes just forgets that it should see the screen, but a restart or a re-plug did nothing. Connecting the monitor to another computer revealed the sad tale: my 15-year-old LCD screen had chosen that night to die.**

And this was a problem. All my mixing software is installed on the computer connected to that dead screen. So, no mixing Wednesday. It occurred to me: maybe the now dark computer monitor decided to go out because it was Ash Wednesday: remember, from silicon dust you came and to silicon dust you’ll return.

Thursday morning I pulled a smaller, lower resolution monitor from my studio space and hooked it up so I could finish this piece.

Just as I trust the mechanic to fix my drive shaft, I trust that someone out there can probably sing this song better than I can, so here’s a chord sheet.

“To Winter” is Claude McKay considering this very time of the year in the Northern U.S. Days are getting longer, there’s more animal activity, water, once ice, will break and flow. McKay’s poem has a complex reaction to this. He concludes he’s feeling winter inside within the moment of the poem, and finds winter outside permits that mood. Last time, with his “Tired Worker” I found some tension between McKay’s Keats-like language and prosody and the weariness of a 20^th century blue-collar laborer. This poem’s my-time-is-like-Keats’-time-may-be-like-some-later-reader’s-21^st-century-time choices cause less strain.***

What a wonderous range of coincidences wove into the past few hours. I chose the Mellotron, 19^th century orchestral sounds as approximated by mid-20^th century technology, mixed on a modern computer whose old LCD monitor left this mortal coil on a snow swirling night at the beginning of the Abrahamic religion’s overlapping spring holy days.

The mechanic has seen to my drive, shaft (“can you dig it”) so that it no longer makes disconsonant noises. I should have a replacement high-resolution computer screen by next week. February snows can be wet and heavy, but to water and mud-luscious they will soon enough go. Crude regimes? I can’t say just myself, but perhaps Carl Sandburg’s “The People, Yes” will increasingly say. So much to repair.

I hope to have a couple more Claude McKay pieces here soon, but to hear this one today, use the audio player below. No audio player to be seen? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan – but I offer this highlighted link as an alternative which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*A virtual instrument contains the modern, much more sophisticated expression of the same idea (the various notes and timbres of a “real” instrument stored as digital recording data instead of one timbre and expression on a strip of magnetic tape for each note pulled along by clockwork springs and levers). My initial attraction to virtual instruments was reading that for only a handful of dollars one could rather precisely “fake the fakery” of the Mellotron without searching out and maintaining a finicky, costly, and increasingly antique instrument.

**The deceased was an HP Compaq LA2405wg model from back when that deleterious merger was fresh. It was a stretch for me to afford then, but in 2010 it was a rare 16:10 1920×1200 display, and I can’t even begin to calculate how many hours I’ve looked at characters and controls on that screen! Everything I’ve ever mixed, every video I’ve ever done, and a lot of writing and research for this Project were done on it.

***McKay’s poem reminds me a little of my favorite John Keats’ poem, “In the Drear-Nighted December.”

The Tired Worker

February 17, 2026February 17, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

On the page, and probably in my recorded musical performance, this poem is an odd combination. Here’s a link to the text of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker.” Its subject is altogether common: the fatigue of someone who is overtaxed by their job, and a night whose worry and weariness has paradoxically robbed them of enough rest to hope for a better tomorrow. Claude McKay, the author I’m featuring this month, knew these feelings firsthand from the jobs he’d held to support himself as a newly landed US immigrant. I dare say most who read this poem have had nights like this too. As poem subjects go, it’s likely as broadly relatable as love and desire.* McKay doesn’t go into detail what kind of work the poem’s titular subject does – but calling them a “worker” and expressing their experience of tired hands and aching feet would indicate a manual labor or a service job.

And here’s what strikes me (and perhaps you) as odd, encountering this in my 21^st century time: the poem is written in flowery, elevated, 19^th century language. For a 1920’s worker to speak of their daily lot as if it’s an 1820 poem contemporary with John Keats seems anachronistic. I’m trying to think of what a current equivalent of this would be, and maybe that’s impossible in that we can’t see, as we can with history’s perspective on McKay’s poem, how out-of-place this poem’s language is with the daily language of its worker or worker-reader.**

That this poem was first printed in The Liberator, a radical socialist publication founded and edited by Max Eastman may be one clue. I’ve spent a few hours this week paging through its early 1920’s issues published from within the Greenwich Village progressive ferment of its time.

I’ve been fascinated by this scene, partly because I had a shirttail relative Susan Glaspell who was an integral part of it, but also because it was a rich mixture. Political, sexual, and artistic radicalism were literal bedfellows. The Liberator featured a great many ads for political tracts, but also for literary books, and many of latter were low-priced reprints aimed at a bohemian’s or workingman’s budget.

Doomscrolling in the 1920s? Michael Angelo’s Sonnets, Tolstoy, William Morris, Shaw, Voltaire, Wilde, and Nietzsche. Also socialism and the story of what Karl Marx did during the American Civil War. 10-50 cents a piece, or all 50 for $4.75. If one can’t sleep after a long workday, such a TBR pile near your bed could reach out to you.

And in between John Reed and Eastman’s first-hand reports from the Russian Soviet Revolution, there was much art and poetry. The art included political/social satire cartoons, illustrations/posters (often in a bold style depicting heroic workers or radicals,) and black and white art depicting nature or the human form. The latter was Modernism of a kind, though I don’t recall much full-fledged abstract works. The famous NYC Armory Modern Art show was nearly a decade past at this point. Carl Sandburg*** had won a Pulitzer in 1919 for his Imagist and free-verse poetry. From the same NYC scene as The Liberator, Others: A Magazine of the New Verse had completed its 4-year run publishing avant garde poetry. Yet, there was much less free-verse in The Liberator than one might expect.

It turns out The Liberator founder/editor Eastman was an early opponent of literary High Modernism. **** If the world and society needed to change, change radically, the old verities of prosody could still serve well to elevate mankind as they strove for that change.

Did Claude McKay feel the same way? I don’t know enough to say. During the early 1920s, he’s listed as an editor on The Liberator’s masthead. Its broad progressive outlook generally supported racial equality, and the NYC Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich Village scenes overlapped.

Claude McKay and Max Eastman

Is that why McKay wrote his worker’s poem this way? There could be more to that choice – he apparently liked the sound of 19^th century British verse; and knew how to extract some word-music beauty from it, as I hope examples I’ve performed may show. Perhaps he felt he was expressing his own soul existing within that workday fatigue – he wasn’t some generalized Worker, but his own particular self, Claude McKay, a man taking pride in knowing this part of his received culture. If so, a man, an Afro-American man, could express that dull proletarian grind with the same word-sounds that once extolled Grecian urns and English nightingales.

Yet, there’s a palpable disconnect here, and I was going to perform the song. I decided to just do my best to not linger on its anachronisms, the “O….thou.…wilts” of this poem. Maybe, the combined character speaking here as I performed it in 2026 is a man living in three centuries simultaneously while speaking in the manner of one class while living in the manner of another. McKay may be not so much colonized, as a colony-creature, a siphonophore banding together more than one mind and tongue. As I wrote talking about McKay earlier this month, poets are often, in effect, immigrants or exiles by their natures, souls seeking and divided from the world and nations they find themselves in.

You can hear my musical performance of Claude McKay’s “The Tired Worker” with the audio player you should see below. Has the graphical player gadget said screw-it and called in sick? No, some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*Once more I’ll remind readers that I’ve encouraged something I call “The Sandburg Test.” The test is to ask, does at least one poem in any substantial collection of poetry deal with the world of work? If you’re reading a Carl Sandburg collection, the answer will be yes. Other poets? Well, read, and ask yourself.

**The closest I could come up with would be the trope of some Americana artists of adapting decades-older styles of music and lyrics to express modern problems – but most of those borrowed styles are less formal and more-or-less reflect working-class speech of the past times.

*** Socialist and free-verse Modernist Sandburg did publish at least one poem in The Liberator. And for contrast, here’s Sandburg taking his Imagist approach to the same subject as McKay’s poem.

****Eastman is a character I don’t have room to go into today. Escaping by the skin of his teeth from the grasp of the first American Red Scare as an editor of The Liberator’s radical forebearer The Masses in 1917 – that magazine was shut down by the federal government and he was arrested, charged, and tried with only a final hung jury keeping him out of prison. His long life saw him continue to resist the rise of obscure Modernist literature, while moving from founding fiery left-wing magazines in the WWI era, to becoming an editor of the Readers Digest during WWII, to contributing to the post-WWII launch of the conservative The National Review. and to at least qualified support for the second great American Red Scare in the 1950s.

Flower of Love

February 11, 2026February 11, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Valentine’s Day comes within Black History Month in the United States. Might be coincidence – but when it comes to diverse lyrical depictions of love, desire, heartbreak, and joy-in-connection depicted in song, this would seem appropriate. But this wasn’t always so.

Read on. We’re going to talk about poetry and flowers – well, sort of, and there’s some nasty bottleneck slide guitar at the end of this.

Choosing the poetry of Claude McKay as my Black History Month focus this year, I’d have to deal with some preconceptions of his work. One, his poetry is written in the 19^th century style that the Modernist poets I often select for use were all about replacing. I admire that early Modernist outlook, but it’s not required if the older prosody and what it is conveying attracts me. A second factor is that McKay (like many poets that don’t reach the upper levels of The Canon) is only known for one or two poems – poems anthologized enough to be recognized, but also poems misrecognizing the range of his poetry. Another Afro-American example I’ve featured here is Chicago poet Fenton Johnson who is known almost entirely for one poem, the short, bleak, despairing “Tired” that begins “I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization.” McKay’s equivalent is the defiant sonnet of self-defense “If we must die…” which is a striking, memorable, work – and then there’s one other poem of McKay’s that retains some current readership, his complex and eloquent poem “America.” Despite these old-school accentual syllabic rhyming verse structures and elevated literary language, either of those McKay poems could be read today, in this America, and be understood as vigorous statements about contemporary civic issues – so perhaps there’s nothing wrong with those two being McKay’s representation. They’re not valentines though.

But.

Reading through McKay’s 1922 Harlem Shadows collection and his other 1920s work, I’m struck by how much of his poetry deals with his immigrant status – and then even more: how many are love poems or poems dealing with desire and eros. In the short term, this cost McKay. Long time readers here, or those familiar with American Black history in this era, may remember that the Afro-American cultural and political leadership circa 1920 were all about establishing the sober respectability of Black Americans, and erotic expression was not part of that. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill prudishness – after all, rape was part of the crimes committed against Black Americans, and also a criminal fear used to trump up racism and violence against Black men. In either case, and beyond abuse, sexuality could be too easily seen as an “animal nature” thing not befitting a safe civic personhood.

So if we take Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues poetry collection published four years after McKay’s Harlem Shadows you’ll see some documentary depictions of nightlife depicted journalistically, and praise for disreputable Jazz music then associated with “loose living” – subjects that were considered edgy enough for The New Negro gatekeepers then – but you won’t see Hughes including a bunch of poems about erotic love.* Harlem Renaissance predecessor Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote some sentimental love poetry which just might have some subtext,** but it was without the heat of desire. McKay, on the other hand, filled his 1922 book with it.

If he got away with it at all, it was because McKay hid his eros in poetry like that in today’s poem/now song with a hot-house language of flowers and landscapes cloaking the heavy-breathing. I had trouble when labeling my Apple podcasts posting of this song today. Should I click the warning “explicit” or stay with my usual “clean?” Do I have, as my own city’s bard once proclaimed, “A Dirty Mind” to think that this poem is written knowing that flowers are a plant’s sexual organs?*** In the end, I clicked clean, not because the poem isn’t saturated with desire, but because one must read it as a double-entendre to see that. My hope is that any kids that might find it (or its text I’ll link here) will gain research skills of some value, and I won’t go through the lines of the poem and “translate” what I think is being depicted – that’s the last thing kids want to hear an old man speaking of. IYKYK.

One other thing is striking about today’s poem, and much of McKay’s poetry of love and desire: there’s no gender in it. Accounts and accepted evidence vary somewhat, but many who want to determine McKay’s own biographical sexuality think he was bisexual. Given that his poem seems to be set in a diverse flower garden, it might resonate with a variety of ardent lovers as we approach Valentine’s Day.

When I tried to type Blake’s “lust of the goat” into a search engine to check the exact wording, I typed something that autocorrected “lust” to “load.” To my amazement AI decided to explicate goat loads of meaning from that typo.

Music? One DEI I can’t foreswear is whatever I find myself doing musically, I’ll want to try something else if I see I’m settling into a pattern. So, back into the cases go the acoustic guitars. No spare pianos either. Glass bottleneck on the finger, Telecaster plugged in, and grindstone to the amplifier gain. The lust of the grit is the bounty of God! You can hear that with the audio player below. What, no player gadget? Joys impregnate! Sorrows bring forth! Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player!

*This Langston Hughes poem that I’ve performed is read as a depiction of the man’s own personal eroticism by many readers. I’m not entirely sure of that.

**I still not sure if this Paul Laurence Dunbar Valentine poem intentionally means to invoke slavery – it would be a stranger and stronger poem if it does.

***McKay came to America to go to an agricultural college, horticultural birds and bees would be a given. Flowers are often represented in his poetry, as much as in gardener-poet Emily Dickinson’s verse.

When I Have Passed Away

February 8, 2026February 8, 2026 ~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Here’s another short poem by Claude McKay made into a song. In his “When I Have Passed Away” a young poet seems to be imagining his own legacy – a prediction both restrained and hopeful. As in the first poem of this Black History Month series featuring his poetry, McKay will subtly mention two things that are potentially othering his living voice. Within the poem’s first quatrain he writes of a belief that he, the author, will likely be forgotten and uncelebrated. He posits an unmarked grave, which strikes one as a sad conclusion, but I think his second line “And no one living can recall my face” has an element of release. In this obscure future a reader will likely not know his black-skinned face, that instant, contemporaneous, racial stereotyping will have been overthrown by a forgetting time that has discarded his particular self. And as in “The Cities Love,” he will remind us that he’s writing this as an immigrant, who will likely die and be buried away from Jamaica, the country of his childhood, in “alien sod.”

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. Somewhat like McKay, it’s my hope that someone else will someday choose to sing some of these Parlando Project songs

Let me interject myself into McKay’s story here. I think many, perhaps most, American poets find themselves in a state of exile. Our dominant culture doesn’t greatly care for poetry, and it cares even less for poets than for their art. Yes, I am making a broad generalization, but McKay in his poem seems realistic in his expectations. If we become by choice or exile citizens of poetry, we will speak a different dialect with strange accents, we will be inured to different customs, we will have saints and prophets un-worshiped here. If Claude McKay can realistically expect that – in McKay’s case, it will not be his poetic citizenship that exposes him to common and actively state-sanctioned dangers and discrimination so much as the inherent alienation bestowed upon an immigrant with dark skin.* None-the-less, I write this to point out that McKay the poet might share this smaller, ignored and unvalued, status with other poets too.

McKay’s second quatrain hopes for some distant youth and a surviving dusty volume of verse. Perhaps this youth might be an immigrant from the country of poetry and song who has found themselves a minority in our nation of casual oppression and mercantile investment.

Again, I feel I must appear again here, though I am not exactly what McKay expected. I’m entirely far from young. I read this poem in a scanned e-book – not dusty, though my touch screen had a light scrim of fingerprints over his more than 100-year-old words. When McKay writes of his page poem as a “little song” and implies it has a tune, I’m called to do the Parlando Project thing with it. Here we are then, separate: this young Black immigrant from Jamaica, and this an old white man away from his tiny Iowa town he grew up in – we meet on these simple words of his and, touch – and I find I must hum out a tune for Claude McKay whose name and some little of his life I do know.

You can hear that song with the audio player below. If you don’t see a player, if there’s no tree or stone or html gadget to mark its place, I’ll offer this highlighted link that will open a new first-edition-with-dust-cover browser tab displaying its own audio player.

*I think here of Renee Good – killed on the broad avenue across the alley behind the window where I sit writing this – a border-crossing death in a cultural battle where immigrants are the “vermin” from “garbage countries” projected as monstrous invaders to justify thuggery and the decrees of tyrants. As a poet, as she was, no one would have asked for her papers, her hard-won college award for her poetry, even if that made her one who will try to find her way as an immigrant-of-a-sort in the land she was born in. It is also not out of the question that she was executed, at least in part, for her being gay.

Racial Relations and gender play in the 1940s-‘50s scrapbook, Part Ten

February 27, 2025February 27, 2025 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Early this morning, I was reading a blog of a modern avant garde poet who has lots of philosophic theories about prosody, and there this quote of Walter Benjamin’s is brought up: “To write history is to give dates their physiognomy.” Well, yes, I thought, that’s what I’ve been doing in this Black History Month series. This scrapbook, its photographs, ephemera, ads, and clippings from newspapers — all a picture of the history of an American Black man: Lawrence Kasuth “Hank” Hazlett, a musician and singer who lived from 1911 to 1990. That scrapbook that had come into my hands portrays his nation-touring time in the 1940s and a residence in South Minneapolis in the 1950s. When it comes to civil rights or diversity, we tend to see change, or the preceding things that needed to change, from a later vantage point. The scrapbook documents such a preceding time, and the sort of things that musician Frank Zappa liked to call “mutations” — the tiny breaking of norms. But, isn’t it just a scrapbook?

There are pieces in the scrapbook that may give us a glimpse into what its maker noted and selected to save. In the last post, we saw a picture of Hazlett playing on stage with a white bass player with the hippest of truncated neckwear — but overall, the performance photos show black musicians with him, playing (as far as I can see) to black audiences. Yet, here’s a photo from the scrapbook that stood out from that segregated norm:

In this photograph two black men (the one on the left appears to be Hazlett) are sitting on a cheap enameled-bedstead bed eating. Sitting on the same bed is a white woman and behind those three, a white man in a dark suit is standing. Black and white, men and the woman are smiling. It looks like an inexpensive hotel room, and maybe they’re all on tour.

On the back of the postcard they wrote: To Edith and Hank. So nice meeting you, it’s a pleasure to be an entertainer along with you. Jeannie Bill and Don

The scrapbook also collects this promotional picture postcard for an act called Jennie and her Boyfriends, who issued a single 45 RPM do-wop style record in 1959. Jeannie in the promo picture has a completely different hairstyle and hair-color, but it’s plausible this is her and one of the members of her trio in the bed-sitting photo.

Also in the last post in the series, we showed some clippings in the scrapbook of Black entertainers working to defeat limiting stereotypes, but one thing that struck me was that the scrapbook also contains clippings showing white entertainment figures. Ephemera in the book, like that MGM W2 form from ’44 and Los Angeles addresses for Hazlett make me think that he might have had at least tenuous connections with some of them during the 1940s. Here’s a page from the scrapbook showing a clipping featuring Lana Turner, which may have been included because its caption says Turner likes Duke Ellington records.**

Lana Turner isn’t into vinyl, she’s spinning shellac.

These are old clippings, sometimes from lower-res reproduction, and occasionally I’m misled by the ambiguities of race in the photographs. Take this one of Jean Parks found on this page with both white and Black entertainment figures. I figured she was white.

Find the second Afro-American woman on this page.

Those who’ve followed this blog will know that I was immediately saying to myself “Who’s Jean Parks?” The story outlined from asking that is as rich or richer than the story of Bruce Dybvig from earlier in this series. WWII military service put a crimp on the supply of male musicians — so just as with other occupations, there soon arose a number of female bands — Rosie the Riveter, only with saxophones. Popular pre-war bands often enough had female singers, and there were a smattering of woman pianists (and small-group guitarists) — but women playing horns, reeds, drums in big bands— important featured instruments in those ensembles — I can’t think of one. Then came the war and mobilization. All of a sudden there were groups entirely made up of Black or white lady musos sprung full borne from the brow as it were.

One of those was Eddie Durham’s All-Star Girl Orchestra. OK, now we’re studying history, so we have to do dates. It’s Victory over Japan Day, the war is over. In NYC a sailor grabs a nurse in a crowd without her consent, starts kissing her in front of a cameraman, and everything thinks this is splendid because the immense horrors of world war are over — and the, you know, sissy stuff of regular old living is to return. The All-Star Girl Orchestra are in the middle of an engagement on the opposite coast, in Oakland California. The link above says that manager Durham sees that the men are going to return — and just then, dissolves the act. Well, sort of. Some remainder is rebranded around singer Jean Parks. As it turns out, the post-WWII years will be tough for all big bands — and all-around, the all-girl band thing doesn’t survive the peace.

And here’s what happens when Parks meets the world of The Fifties. Just look at the bad-girl triple-double implied and indicted in this paragraph: Black, caught with a 6-foot-tall platinum blond “friend”/roommate, sex-work — and drugs? We got’em all: reefer, opium, cocaine. Other than a Communist Party membership card signed Mr. and Mrs. and documents linking her to a plot to cancel Howdy Doody, this is complete “All-Star” material.***

Seeing that other headline on the Jet cover, and suddenly I’m a teenager in the back row of the classroom muttering to a classmate “I must be drinking the wrong kind of booze.”

Two other pictures in the scrapbook seem to tell some kind of story about connections between the races, likely in Minneapolis in the ‘50s. There’s this snapshot, pasted on the same page as the similarly posed picture I speculated last time might be of a child of the Hazletts. I have no idea who Maxine is, or who’s Chuck. But as with the other pictures and accounts in today’s post, I’d reckon that mixed race connections like this had elements of risk beyond just social disapprobation. White school integration riots, Emmett Till, the beating and burning of the Freedom Riders buses, all were contemporary with the scrapbook.

Then there’s this picture, inscribed to Hank’s wife Edith and so presumably from the early 1950s. So many of us have awkward school-picture-day photos, but I found this one more arresting than awkward. This is hard to detail, so I’m going to be more awkward than the picture, where after all Loretta is smiling and seems comfortable with themselves: Loretta looks quite masculine. Unattributed, it could easily be a 20-year-later photo of a mullet-head male guitar player in someone’s high school rock band. Burn-out the long-point blouse collar and retouch the long tresses in the back and it would be a 1950s boy who wants to grow up to play in Elvis’ band.

Loretta.

There’s no other context other than the inscription and being in the scrapbook. Looking at Loretta’s photo this month I immediately thought of “Get Back,” the Beatles lyric. Some of you may be singing the applicable verse in your head now that I’ve said that. My second thought: I’d love to know Loretta’s story, but there’s next to no chance I ever will.

And now a transition that may or may not be apt. There are several pictures of Hank Hazlett, and Hazlett with his Trio, dressed in drag. I can’t place the club stage shown in most of the pictures. The Telecaster he’s playing says this is likely during the Fifties when he’s largely working out of Minneapolis, and it may be a Minneapolis club. Everyone looks like they’re having a good time, and dressing in drag is a multivalent act that can be meant to convey different things.

Everyone seems to be having a good time. Of course, right now we know it’s supposed to mean danger to children, and therefore we must let rich folks get richer so they can stop those goings on, because…religion. That’s a very serious opinion, mandate and all — you ought to pay attention to it instead of looking at this approaching 20,000 word series on — what? — a scrapbook about a Black musician who few have even heard of. And the scrapbook is mostly pictures, where’s the meaning in them? Of course, then there are these other Walter Benjamin quotes: “Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future” and “We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them, when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.” Benjamin’s life, which we know more about than Hank, or Edith Hazlett’s, or Loretta’s life, could be called in to rebut those quotes. In a corporeal sense, he had little future, books didn’t extend his human, breathing, skin-coated living. But Benjamin did have his quotes, groups of words that might work like poems to let us see something new, and there are even some who will read philosophy at length.

There’s a new musical performance today, taken from a piece of folded and unfolded paper that was pasted into the Hazlett scrapbook. Did Edith carry it? Did Hank? On it, in faded pencil, are written 6 quotes, 6 maxims that someone wanted to carry in order to carry on. They are from a mixed-bag of writers, numbered 1-6 on the page, and in which order I read them in this performance: M. B. Whitman, H.D. Thoreau, Lloyd C. Douglas, Helen Keller, Herbert Kaufman, and Ambrose Bierce.

You can hear that performance with the audio player below. What? No player to be seen? Well, there’s injustice, carelessness, and cruelty we don’t see, and that’s a bigger deal than a couple of minutes of me dressing up in weird Jazz-band drag and reading some inspirational quotes — but you could use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*Marv Goldberg mentions that the Cats and the Fiddle might have had some involvement with the 1945 MGM Judy Garland film The Clock, which would have been several years and lineups past the original Cat’s quartet burst of Hollywood film appearances in 1938 — those all even before they had made their first appearance on recordings. A 1945-released film would have overlapped the time that Hazlett was in the Cats, could explain the 1944 W2. Mysteriously, I distinctly recall seeing a clipped advertisement for that movie when I first looked into the scrapbook years ago, thinking I should check the film out — but for some reason it isn’t in the scrapbook now.

**Frank O’Hara poetry fans will note Turner is fully upright and operational in this photo.

***Like The Clock ad, I also distinctly remember seeing an article about someone in entertainment arrested for prostitution when I first looked through the scrapbook years ago. It too is missing now. The scrapbook was part of at least one move, and when I look at it now, I have to take care, as it’s falling apart. I now suspect that might have been more on the Parks case. The All-Star Girl Orchestra could have shared bills with the Cats in Hazlett’s time — they played the same theater circuit during WWII.

When Black History Month was just what you were living, Part Nine

February 26, 2025February 26, 2025 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

My feature this February has been centered around an Afro-American scrapbook entrusted to me after it was found in a crawlspace at a former South Minneapolis rooming house in the middle 1970s. This series has taken me away from the usual Parlando focus, which is combining literary poetry with original music in differing styles. If you’ve been missing that, look to the bottom of today’s post — I’ll have something new for you today.

This exploration has taken a tremendous amount of time and effort, and I sometimes doubt how many readers will share my level of interest in looking back at what’s in and surrounding that scrapbook. It seems worthy of notice to me, and that supports my mind and heart work in this month’s effort. I did warn at the start of this series that what I’m writing here is coming fresh from an examination of the scrapbook, and some of my findings will be preliminary or subject to better evaluation — even little things in this larger than usual collection of writing. I just finished fixing a handful of typos on the previous episode that escaped my eye last night before I went to sleep, and now it’s time for the next one.

As a document the scrapbook spends a lot of time in the World War Two years. The book’s leading man, guitarist and singer Hank Hazlett, got his big show-business break then with the Jazz quartet The Cats and the Fiddle,* and the scrapbook evidences notice of the war in the things its maker chooses to include.

Here’s a Roy Wilkins column collected by the scrapbook maker rejecting racial prejudice in the US armed forces published during the war.

And here are a few more war related clippings in the scrapbook.

Another war-related story included in the scrapbook is a newspaper clipping that tells us of the Hank Hazlett era Cats opening for and then backing Lena Horne in a musical appearance in front of a hospital’s wounded soldiers. The Cat’s opening set was “Stomp, Stomp,” I Miss You So,” “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” with “Another Day” as their encore. With Horne at the mic, the combo supported her singing “Sometimes,” Stormy Weather,” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Having this dated letter from 1944 pasted next to the baby picture opens a theory regarding a possible child of Hank and Edith that I wrote about yesterday. A 1940s child could be part of Hank’s deferment, could be the right age to write Felicia’s letter to Daddy a few years later quoted in yesterday’s post, and later yet could also be a young, teenage woman, the subject of another picture in the scrapbook. That the thank you letter is addressed to Hank indicates to me that he might have been the de facto bandleader for the Cats and the Fiddle during his time with them. He was likely 6 or 7 years older than the other Cats in addition to taking the place of their regular lead singer — so, that role might have fallen to him.

A strong theme throughout the scrapbook is Afro-American pride and their struggle for equity in the arts. Many clippings demonstrate that the maker of the scrapbook was concerned with the stereotyping and constraints on Black entertainers and some clippings celebrate their achievements in overcoming that. Here are a few of those items from the scrapbook:

Did a bronze man create this? Yes. A.C. Hollingsworth created Bronze Man in Blue Beetle #42. As in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem, he was to “wear a mask.” Publishers changed things though. See this link.

I wondered about a series of cartoons in the scrapbook. All white characters, nothing about music. What was the reason the scrapbook took note of them? The cartoonist E. Simms Campbell. was the first Afro-American cartoonist published in the big time U.S. “slick” magazines. His Wikipedia page says his work appeared in nearly every issue of Esquire magazine from 1933 to 1958, and in many other publications.

Dialectic, but make it funny: the clipping tells us Timmy Rogers was a Black comic who wanted to move beyond the blackface fool stereotypes. More info on Rogers. I can find nothing on Crackshot, though he’s given his clipping in the scrapbook too.

The entire multipage program for this landmark stage production starring the multi-talented Paul Robeson was pasted into the scrapbook.

Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, and Butterfly McQueen. Three black women in entertainment who needed to struggle for non-stereotyped parts in the ‘40s. And keeping with our WWII subject, here are the Cats jamming with a white G.I. on bass. The armed forces may have been segregated, but music has established a beachhead. I note too, the scrapbook maker is paying considerable attention to women in the arts.

I knew about Lena Horne and Paul Robeson.

I knew about Robeson, Horne, Dandridge et al. I’d never heard of Pearl Primus before this month’s examination of the the scrapbook. Her Wikipedia entry tells what she did. This, Robeson’s Shakespeare, and the comics artists above are examples of how the scrapbook’s maker wasn’t just interested in music, but had a broad interest in the arts.

Our summary today: not all warriors carry a gun. We’ve had war today, and prejudice, and stereotypes — and me writing a bunch more words (with maybe fewer typos). So, let’s have a little music, and poetry — and love not war. Here’s a poem by Afro-American poet Alice Dunbar Nelson written in the last decade to be called The Twenties. This may be Black History Month, but all I read next to my breakfast each morning this month is telling me that the nonsensical denigration of Black American military and cultural contributions along with a side-helping of gay panic isn’t history, just as it wasn’t history to the maker or makers of the scrapbook. To hear Dunbar-Nelson’s poem “You! Inez!” as I sang it to music composed today in-between typing this, you can use the audio player gadget below. No player? Elon hasn’t fired it, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog suppress it. This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

*A founding member and most often featured singer of the Cats and the Fiddle was drafted. The scrapbook doesn’t deal with this, but I did wonder why Hank or other members of that quartet weren’t drafted. Hank Hazlett was born in 1911, and in 1940 he’d have been 29. The WWII draft was different than the Vietnam draft I’m most familiar with — in my day, most called up were younger than 27. In WWII draft men up to age 35 were commonly drafted. I only know the age of one of the original Cats quartet, but the bass player would have been 22 in 1940, and since the original quartet all knew each other from high school, I’m assuming they were near the same age — yet, as far as I know only Austin Powell was drafted. This is a complicated subject and we know so little about the men in the Cats. There were classes of deferments for various reasons, and even stories that some draft boards didn’t want to draft Afro-Americans for Jim Crowish reasons — this even though the Armed Forces were segregated throughout the war. There were also stipulations for physical condition that histories tell us bedeviled the system during WWII. One oft cited report had it that in the draft first year, 1940, “nearly half the men drafted were sent home” for not being fit enough for service.

Or course a great many Afro-Americans did work in war-industry, or were drafted or volunteered for the military, despite the Armed Forces still hewing to the Jim Crow segregation/white superiority regime of mid-century America.

The Hank Hazlett Trio and South Minneapolis Part Eight

February 24, 2025February 25, 2025 ~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time an Afro-American 35-year-old singer and skilled guitarist named Hank Hazlett had left The Cats and the Fiddle, a swing Jazz quartet made up of Chicagoans, when that group’s founding and featured singer returned after serving in the armed forces during WWII. Hazlett had been standing in for that man, and though he never recorded with the Cats* he got experience touring the best Black-oriented entertainment venues of the 1940s and interacting with other acts that the Cats shared bills with.

Hazlett must have decided he was comfortable fronting a band. In the scrapbook that is the centerpiece of this series, we can find two posed large-format glossy promo photos taken at a professional studio in Chicago of his next act: The Hank Hazlett Trio.

Interesting pairing visually. One with all black suits against a white background, the other all white against a black background. Could be simple use of contrast, but the poet in me sees metaphor.

That photo studio location indicates they were formed in Chicago. The trio was touring in 1947, as the scrapbook contains a letter from a San Antonio radio station thanking the group for an appearance there. I’ve also found this ad for a 1949 Trio appearance in Denver.

The Cats and the Fiddle had played Denver more than 10 years earlier in an early gig before Hazlett joined up. By now this venue says it’s in “The Heart of Denver’s Harlem.”

Unlike the scrapbook material from Hazlett’s Cats in the Fiddle stint, there are no clipped-out ads for appearances by the Hank Hazlett Trio pasted into the scrapbook. We don’t know who sang in the Trio, and I can’t be certain what kind of music they played either. The rapid, chopped chord-change swing Jazz of the Cats was morphing into what was renamed as Rhythm and Blues, a term invented by music journalist soon to be Atlantic records principal Jerry Wexler to replace the previous music business term “race records.” R&B could include former Jazz band vocalists who now fronted small combos, vocal harmony groups like the Cats or their more successful and smoother contemporaries the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, and the newly plugged-in Black rural and southern singers who had moved north to play a gruffer, harder-edged electric Blues. Basically R&B was rock’n’roll, just not named that yet, and with a much smaller white musician contribution when the term was coined.

The first reports I can find of the Trio performing has them backing a Missouri-born by way of Chicago female R&B singer Donna Hightower which are collected on Marv Goldberg’s website.**

The Cats had played as a band for female singers, including backing Lena Horne with Hazlett on guitar.

August 1952 Minneapolis Spokesman (another Black newspaper) wrote this:

The musicians who are playing at the Key Club are Hank Hazlett, leader and Spanish guitar; Maurice Turner, bass fiddle; Buddy Davis, piano and vibraphone; Donna Hightower, Decca recording artist and vocalist. The musicians are all from Chicago and staying at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Gray, 420 E. 37th St.”

That “staying-with” address is in the heart of Black South Minneapolis and would be two short blocks from a Portland Ave address we’ll meet just down the page. Goldberg has them playing at the Key Club in a long-term engagement until New Years Eve. Here’s what the St. Paul Recorder (the other Twin Cities Black newspaper) has to say (with Goldberg’s interjected corrections):

The Hank Hazlett Trio, composed of Buddy Davis, pianist and Maurice Turner, base [sic] drummer, along with the capable leader of the combo Hank Hazlett is now playing at the Key Club, 1229 Washington Ave So., every night and Sunday afternoon matinees.

The popular trio featuring Dinah [sorry Donna] Hightower, vocalist, got its start in Chicago in 1947 and has played successful engagements in many outstanding nightclubs.

Miss Hightower with her ultra modern version of popular music, seems to have a way with the patrons. The entertainers will be here through the holiday season.”

Don’t look for it now, this location was demolished for the I35 freeway.

If you want more details about The Key Club aka South of the Border, the Twin Cities Music Highlights website has much to read. Many national Jazz and R&B luminaries played at this establishment in the Seven Corners portion of Minneapolis’ West Bank neighborhood. Lots of seedy goings-on too, as this era of the Minneapolis Jazz and music scene often finds stripper acts, guns, and likely mob connections intermingling with the musicians.

This YouTube video dub of an acetate (demo or proof record) is the only audio artifact of the Hank Hazlett Trio I’ve found. Donna Hightower sings backing vocals. The guitar and likely the lead vocal is Hank.

Around the time of this extended engagement, it seems that Hazlett moved to the Twin Cities, setting up residency at 3648 Portland Ave in South Minneapolis, six blocks from where the scrapbook was found. Why there?

From what I can gather, Minneapolis has a strange and complex racial history, so please excuse these meager paragraphs that try to summarize the highlights of my incomplete understanding that follows. Minneapolis has long had some Black residents, and when it gathered more in the first waves of the Great Migration after WWI, there was white backlash. One instrument of that backlash were special clauses put into property deeds excluding transfer of those deeds to non-white or Jewish buyers. In theory government courts would need to be called in to enforce these racial covenants, but in practice these were often a silent exclusionary agreements, though they were sometimes enforced in breach by mobs of sullen whites who would surround an incursive Black occupied home with threats and vandalism against this blatant integration. This private customary segregation was later reinforced around mid-century by “red-lining,” a practice by home-loan issuers (including federal government loans) to exclude writing mortgages in Black areas. All of this, pretty rotten stuff — but perfectly “normal” and widespread in the United States, not just Minneapolis.***

In Minneapolis there were two sections of the city that became “Black:” one, on the north side of town (shared with a Jewish population that were often excluded by the same covenants and a higher than usual American level of local antisemitism), and the other, a vertical north-south strip in South Minneapolis. 3132 Park Ave was just on the borderline of these redline established sections. Even when I came to South Minneapolis in the ‘70s, you could see by the skin tones of the residents where those invisible lines sort of remained, to a fine resolution that could be almost block by block.****

Our 1953 musician Hank Hazlett lived in a house in the Black South Minneapolis area for several years, his only Minneapolis residence I can establish. I don’t know if he owned it, but the scrapbook maker was proud of it. There are a couple of photos clearly identifiable as his house, one with a new-looking or late-model 1953 Cadillac parked in front. I don’t know what his income was. The city directories continue to list him as musician, and at least in the mid-50s his local gigs were common. Even this late in the 20^th century, when radio, television and recordings allowed music to be captured and transmitted on devices, live music was still a vital part of the experience of music. Perhaps for Hank the choice of Minneapolis went like this: I could tour from any city as my home base. The music scene in Minneapolis may be smaller than Chicago or LA, but on the other hand there are fewer Black bands competing for the club slots — and since it’s not a town to launch one’s new act to musical stardom, my middle-aged self may be able to settle down without having to directly compete with the most ambitious young acts.

One of the pictures of 3648 Portland Ave in the scrapbook. I’m assuming the car is Hazlett’s. The scrapbook has 1955 telegrams directing Hazlett and his trio to go from a gig at Williston ND to Sheboygan WI and that Scotts Bluff in Nebraska is cancelled. If they drove, that’d be a good car for this.

The city directory records tell us that he had a wife, Edith. It could be that the marriage predates 1953, and there’s certainly lots of 1940s material in the scrapbook if she collected any of it then. There’s a possibility they have a child. The scrapbook is oh so scant on this. There are three photos of young children on its pages. The oldest by background clues may be as early as the 1940s, and it shows a young toddler standing in a quiet road that is not Portland Ave, and in pen on the bottom it says “Earl P. Jr. 2 years old.” Lawrence/Hank Hazlett isn’t Earl, and “Jr.” traditionally means a father’s name given to an offspring. And then there’s a pair of what looks to me like two snapshots of one child. One shot of this kid shows a smiling sub-1-year-old in their onesie. To the right of that photo is pasted another one of a young Black couple sitting in front of moon and stars backdrop. That man doesn’t look like Hank Hazlett to me, but not only are the two photos near each other, I can sort of see the baby looking like the child of that couple. It’s possible that the man in the moon and stars photo is a much younger version of the performer Hazzlett, who I have only older-age pictures of. And finally there’s a somewhat serious looking, slightly older child in a push stroller-scooter. The back of that last photo has a date: 1952.

This is the second set of baby pictures that I think may be the same child. The one in the middle is dated 1952. Do you think the moon & stars picture that’s pasted on the same page as the left-hand baby is a younger Hank? There’s another picture below of a woman that may be an older Edith Hazlett.

There’s also a handwritten, child-like letter which I transcribe as:

Dear Daddy,

How are you? Fine I hope.

And all the others. We had a vary nice Christmas. Well today is the last day in the year and a new year is coming. Yvonne Dickie Gwen and myself are getting along fine in music. I love my fountain pen. We all like our fountains very much, our pens write fine.

Thanks for the money, Daddy. We were very glad to hear your voice. I have been over to whites ever since last Friday. White has a lot of Christmas cards. They are very pretty. Yvonne and Dickie White has a beautiful Christmas tree. I am glad you liked my present, and I know that picture is a good picture. White Chick and Marshall like there souvenirs very much. Well goodbye and good luck. With a lot of love

Felicia”

This could be an “on tour” letter to a traveling father from home — New Year’s Eve is always a prime gig opportunity. Or it could mean that the child doesn’t live with her father. Someone chose to put this letter in the scrapbook, and I believe the scrapbook was made by Hank, his wife Edith, or the two of them in collaboration. Knowing more would change the meaning of the letter.

Let me be clear: a musician’s life, particularly a touring musician, detracts from marital stability. Incomes change rapidly. Travel and late-night hours bring separation. Alcoholism and drug problems are endemic. Egos swell and are crushed and those changes can abrade a relationship.

The Minneapolis city directory tells us one more thing about Hank Hazlett’s home life. In 1958 the city directory records that Marian M. is now the wife at 3648 Portland. Marian is also listed as working for the Minneapolis Public Library. Hank is now 47, and the city directory doesn’t say “musician” next to his name — instead it says “banquet formn Dyckmann Hotel.” Same in ’59. In 1960 and ’61 Hank is shown at the 3648 Portland address, but he’s a musician and working at the Flame in Duluth, 150 miles north. In 1962 and ‘63 the musicians place of work is listed as the Manor House in St. Paul and the Downtowner Motel in ’63. Marian remains until the most recent city directory available listed as his wife.

The last Hank Hazlett Trio gig I have found a record of was at a strip club/lounge on Hennepin Ave called “The Copper Squirrel” in September of 1963.

Site of the last known Hank Hazlett Trio gig.

I’ll admit, like someone looking at amorphous clouds in the sky I can picture these scenes: Marian isn’t necessarily up with the musician’s lifestyle. If Edith is the maker of the scrapbook or a collaborator in making of this document largely about her ex-husband’s life and music career she may have taken it with her. Out of spite or from fond memories of their days together? Maybe Marian didn’t want that scrapbook mostly about Hank’s earlier life around anyway? Who can say? Maybe it’s something else. There are no pictures in the scrapbook I can say for sure are post-1958. If Hank was the one making the scrapbook, maybe he had tired of documenting things.

Here are two picture which look like they could be the same woman found in different parts of the scrapbook. The man is Hank Hazlett, and I suspect that the woman would be Edith Hazlett prior to 1958. Edith may have been the person who made the scrapbook of her husband’s career, and may have been the one who put it in a crawlspace to be found in the mid-1970s.

Here’s a quartet of scrapbook photos of the Hank Hazlett Trio performing.

Hank with an Epiphone archtop in most of these photos, but a “blackguard” early ‘50s Telecaster in one. In the upper right there’s a woman holding down the pianist’s spot in the trio, and the white bass player there is crossing time and space with that tie he’s wearing to protest Donald Trump’s haberdashery sense and opinions about Black History Month.

In our next post we’ll track back a bit and talk about how the scrapbook includes the home-front World War II experience and what else it shows about American mid-century race relations and Afro-American cultural pride.

*The WWII years caused considerable interruption in recording activity. Shellac, the hardened resin that 78 RPM records were made from came from a residue produced by overseas insects located across a warfront Pacific Ocean, and there were strikes by musicians labor organizations as they tried to extract concessions from entertainment companies during this time too.

**I’ve mentioned Marv Golberg’s site multiple times in this series. It’s full of marvelous details about Jazz and R&B artists of this era. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Marv.

***Just after the end of WWII the practice of racial covenants was taken to court, and in an early post-war civil rights victory, they were struck down nationally, but redlining was not addressed, and “it goes without saying” agreements to hew to segregation continued. Yet at the same time in the late 1940s, a young Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey saw to enactment of an early law against racial discrimination in hiring, giving promise that more job opportunities would open up for Black residents.

****By these 1970s properties in these parts of South Minneapolis were affordable, assuming you could swing the finances, because it was still considered a “bad part of town.” This led to some kinds of mostly young white people to move in: gay folks, and Boomer “hippies” and political radicals. Some of that generation are still alive, and still live there, and there’s a new influx: immigrants from Africa and Latin America.

Introducing Hank Hazlett, our Scrapbook’s leading man, Part Seven

February 23, 2025February 24, 2025 ~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Let’s open the scrapbook we’ve been talking about this month and look to see what it shows us about the beginnings of its central subject: the guitarist and singer Lawrence “Hank” Hazlett who’ve we know was a sometime member of a Jazz guitars-with-standup-bass quartet The Cats and the Fiddle. From previous posts in this series we know the Cats started in Chicago with a group of musicians that knew each other from high school. In 1937, while group members were not yet out of their teens, they left Chicago for Los Angeles and Hollywood where they managed to perform in a couple of small movies as themselves while also snagging a few appearances as extras in larger budget motion pictures. In 1939, back in Chicago, they get a contract with Bluebird records and start recording their material, most of which are short, self-written and self-accompanied songs, featuring Swing-Era hep-cat outlook, humor, and slang. Signed to the William Morris talent agency, they begin touring nationally.

I have not seen this picture elsewhere outside of the scrapbook. It shows the act as still represented by William Morris. The shadowy photography here of a dark skinned face in the lower left doesn’t make it certain, but this could be a rare promo shot of Hank Hazlett with the WWII-era Cats without their leader Austin Powell.

As far as the scrapbook’s scope goes, Hazlett barely appears before joining the Cats midway in the combo’s career. The earliest thing the scrapbook has on him is a well-worn U.S. Employee Service Applicants Identification Card for Lawrence Hazlett. The card gives his address as 5159 Prairie Ave, but there’s no visible city. That address exists in the L.A. area near Lennox and W. Century Blvd., but also in Chicago’s Bronzeville — so we could place Hazlett in either city the Cats were active in during the late 1930s. The card has him 5’ 10” in height, 147 pounds, and there’s a filled-in blank that has the number 24 — I’m guessing that’s his age. Given that Marv Goldberg has Hazlett as being born in 1911 in St. Louis, that would make the card’s issuance as around 1935, and from that approximate date the card could be a government form related to unemployment insurance or the New Deal WPA.* There are two blanks to enter in “ssification” which I read as classification, a P. and S., with that second filled in as a “Jr. Artist.”

Anyone know more about this kind of ID card?

So, here we have the earliest thing I know for sure about the scrapbook’s leading man: a slip of paper from before the Cats and the Fiddle existed that says Hazlett may have pursued a career in art circa 1935.

Histories of the Cats and the Fiddle tell us that in 1943, Austin Powell, the most often featured lead vocalist of the all-singing and all-playing quartet was drafted. This would be a serious blow to the group. Recordings were scant during the war years, but the act was touring and likely had gigs to meet. Hank Hazlett is selected as Powell’s replacement. Like Powell he played guitar, and evidence suggests he may have been at least Powell’s equal on that instrument.** I also assume he was a good singer with some on-stage showmanship. We don’t know where Hazlett joined up with the Cats, but it’s likely in Chicago or L.A. We have one other document in the scrapbook with a firm date around this time, a W2 for the year 1944 which shows Hazlett earned $125 from Loews Inc, M.G.M Pictures of California giving Hazlett’s address then as 912 E. 27^th St. in L.A. This might have been for work as a movie extra or musician.

Extra in a movie? Soundtrack work? Movie theater appearance?

There are clippings and a few photos documenting the 2-3 years Hazlett was a member and touring with the Cats and the Fiddle in the scrapbook. Here are a few of them.

Some of the places and bills as Hazlett toured with the Cats and the Fiddle 1943-46. In the upper-center photo that’s Hazlett on the left playing a guitar that may be the one in the promo shot above.

The hypnotist Capt. De Zita’s work? Typo on the headline and dubious hype that the Cats and the Fiddle are appearing in person in L.A. for the first time in 1944

In 1946, Austin Powell is mustered out and returns to the group that is still working though not breaking through to upper levels of fame. Having the original lead singer back doesn’t seem to revive their career fortunes, though the act will continue until 1950. As far as anyone knows, Hazlett’s tenure with the Cats and the Fiddle ends when founding and featured member Powell comes back.

Hazlett seems to remain a professional musician though. There are new promo pictures made, taken by a Chicago-based photo studio for a new act: upright bass, piano, and Hazlett on guitar: the Hank Hazlett Trio. What we can see of them in the scrapbook is our topic for next time.

*I’m thinking more likely the WPA. The Works Progress Administration was a unique New Deal program to counter the Great Depression. In sites around the country it gave jobs to workers, writers, actors, musicians, and artists to produce or teach various projects and works of art. I know little about Hazlett’s family or situation growing up, even how long he was in St. Louis, his stated birthplace. His place of death was Los Angeles in one report I’ve seen, so he may have some connections there. It’s only a feeling, but I’m guessing he may have had a middle-class Black family with exposure to arts and culture before we find him in the scrapbook as a nationally touring musician.

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