Summary

African American music and literature have been consistently intertwined. This connection is true in narrative, which has its basis in the history and culture-keeping of orature, and in poetry, which transcends geography and culture in aligning with music. Among African Americans, the influence of Black music on literary art is longstanding, as is the use of music instrumentally and lyrically, especially blues, to convey all manner of life’s experiences. From the early liberation narratives of Frederick Douglass and the groundbreaking writing of W. E. B. Du Bois to the novels, poems, and plays of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Fanonne Honorée Jeffers, Suzan-Lori Parks, William Henry Lewis, Jesmyn Ward, and Toni Morrison, among others, references to music, songs, and musicians, as well as replication of musical rhythms in writing, regularly occur in literature by African Americans. Stories also fill the sonic expressions of many African American musicians. Duke Ellington musically recreates scenes from Shakespear’s plays, and John Coltrane uses his saxophone as a speaking instrument to recite an eponymous poem from his album A Love Supreme. The cultural productions of African American writers and musicians are mutually significant intertexts that, with the African American cultural practice of riffs, repetition, and revision, have sustained these artists through time.