Jubilee

how would you have us is a song cycle of original music featuring text written one hundred years ago by Black American authors. The poems, novels, essays, plays, pamphlets, and stories adapted here were almost all written between 1892 and 1929 through the early years of the Harlem Renaissance. The piece cites some of the more famous names we remember from this era, like Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Ida B. Wells alongside authors whom I first encountered in my research for this project, like Jessie Fauset, the longtime literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, or Marita Bonner, whose early plays and essays published in The Crisis became central moments in this work.

There are a few exceptions to the provenance of the music and text. “lift every voice” is a reharmonization of a hymn written by J. Rosamund Johnson. He adapted a poem written by his brother, James Weldon Johnson, that was first recited by Black schoolchildren in Jacksonville, Florida in 1900 for the celebration of Lincoln’s birthday. This hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was named the Negro National Anthem by the NAACP in 1919.

This piece includes an interpolation of “The Laughing Man,” a song written and performed by George Washington Johnson. First recorded in 1890, “The Laughing Man” was Johnson’s follow-up to his first record, “The Whistling Coon.” Both songs notably used non-singing musical sounds (laughter and whistling, respectively) and through the 1890s became the very first popular music recordings in the United States, with “The Laughing Man” advertising over 50,000 copies sold. Reproduction of phonograph records would not become possible until the very beginning of the 20th century, which meant that Johnson had to record these songs thousands of times to create the many phonograph cylinders. He did not own the masters to these songs and was not paid any royalties beyond the ~20 cents Black musicians were offered per recording session at the time.

Two poems in the piece (“Mom Flower” and “Where Poems Hide For Me”, which are used in “garden” and “not in my day” respectively) are from my fourth grade English class journal. I wrote them during our poetry unit in May 2007; I was 9 years old.

I am writing this piece during a time often described, culturally and politically, as unprecedented. Feeling sufficiently discouraged and fatigued by that description, I have searched for some kind of precedent to wrap my head around. The Harlem Renaissance, which began about sixty years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, drew a neat parallel to our current time, sixty years after the socially upending wake of the Civil Rights Movement(s) of the 1960s. I am uplifted and transformed by the century-old words I’ve encountered in this piece and the wisdom that these people had for themselves and for us. Through amplifying and engaging with their texts, I want us all to think about the vision we have for ourselves and for those who come after us.