A bit more on Langston Hughes

• The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. 
• When he was eleven years old, he heard the blues coming from an orchestra of blind musicians on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. 
• Hughes moved to the East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York, and 7th Street in Washington, D.C. 
• "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th Street," he remembered in his autobiography The Big Sea. Those songs "had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." 
• The blues stanza allowed Hughes to convey the African American experience in people's own vernacular language.
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folkways.si.edu/poetry-ballad-blues-stanzas/music/article/smithsonian

Dream Boogie
​by langston Hughes

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
​
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -

You think
It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a -

What did I say?

Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!

Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!


Y-e-a-h! 

Dream Variations
​by langston Hughes

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening…
A tall, slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Dream Boogie and Dream Variations can be found in in this book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children, Nikki Giovanni. This book is a great resource of poetry with a beat, including recorded performances of the collection. You can find it many places, including,  Amazon.