Hidden Folklorists: Langston Hughes, with guests Langston Collin Wilkins and Sophie Abramowitz
Folklife Today Podcast
English - June 30, 2021 14:00 - 38 minutes - 45 MB - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsBooks Arts library of congress loc folklife today american folklife center folklife cultural traditions oral history music songs storytelling Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Hidden Folklorists: Becky Elzy, Alberta Bradford and E.A. McIlhenny, with guest Joshua Clegg Caffery
Next Episode: Summer Songs Part 1
This episode looks at a “Hidden Folklorist” renowned as a poet and playwright: Langston Hughes. It includes interviews with folklorist Langston Collin Wilkins and Hughes scholar Sophie Abramowitz. Wilkins and Abramowitz show us how Langston Hughes’s folklore work was grounded in song collecting and vernacular expression, and committed to the visionary futurity of Black folkloric creativity. We also explore Hughes’s connections to the American Folklife Center archive, especially correspondence between Hughes and Alan Lomax that preserves perhaps the only known copies of some of Hughes’s collected songs, right here in the Library of Congress.