SATURDAY RUBRICS: 4/19/25

PETE SEEGER & LANGSTON HUGHES

BEFORE GOOGLE: Pete Seeger and Langston Hughes at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. Photo by David Gahr.

I’ve always loved this video of Seeger’s version of this Bob Dylan song accompanied by a children’s choir to commemorate Amnesty International’s 50th year of service.

The year after the photo of Seeger and Hughes was taken in Newport at its Folk Festival, Hughes returned for the town’s Jazz Festival but experienced instead the 1960 Jazz Festival riots. From The Newport Daily News’s 2012 story looking back at those riots:

On Friday, July 1, 1960, The Daily News reported that opening shows of the seventh annual Newport Jazz Festival at the Cliff Walk Manor nearly had to be postponed because of sparse attendance. The lack of an audience reportedly sent jazz legend Charles Mingus into a frenzy, as he walked off stage and then attempted to throw acid into the face of festival chairman Louis L. Lorillard.

But another story that day announced a string of violent incidents in town, including: A sailor suffering an 11-inch cut across his palm and wrist after being jumped by six youth; eight youths jumping on top of a car driving down Pelham Street and smashing two windows; four youths setting off a fire hose on the second floor of the Hotel Viking; and a 19-year-old man, who was trying to scale the walls to get into Freebody Park for the show there, found to have a billy club loaded with lead.

“These are but a sampling of the incidents in the frantic night which, from all indications, may be just the beginning,” The Daily News reported.

The writer did not realize how prescient he was.

On Saturday, July 2, Newport turned into a battle zone as thousands of people shut out of the sold-out shows wandered the Newport streets, fueled by alcohol, hurling beer bottles and rocks at police officers trying to quell the crowd. The State Police and, eventually, the National Guard had to be called in for help.

Tear gas was used in a vain attempt to disburse the rioters. Firefighters were called in to spray the crowd with high-pressure hoses. Nearly 200 people were arrested and 160 were treated in the emergency room at Newport Hospital.

On Dec. 21, 1960, the City Council held a hearing to decide whether to issue the festival a license for 1961. The hearing turned into a mini-riot of its own.

“At times uproarious — and termed by a young sailor as 'just like the festival, a riot practically' — the hearing produced an even division of applause for the pros and cons (of having the festival in Newport). Speakers opposed to the festival were more numerous and included many residents in the area of Freebody Park, where the concerts are held,” The Daily News reported.

Testimony included personal anecdotes, including from one 70-year-old woman who said she had to patrol her yard with a pitch fork to keep festival-goers out. A Middleton Avenue resident said he had to string his hedges with barbed wire to keep out people intent on using his yard as a bathroom.

The council ultimately refused to issue a license to the festival for 1961. But it returned in 1962 and continued at Freebody Park for two more years before moving to an open field, renamed Festival Field, off of Admiral Kalbfus Road in 1965.

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Below is the first paragraph of Chapter Four of Scott Saul’s book Freedom Is,Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties published by the Harvard University Press. The chapter is titled “THE RIOT IN REVERSE/The Newport Rebels, Langston Hughes, and the Mockery of Freedom.”

The paragraph:

If the history of the civil rights movement were written as a series of cultural skirmishes—disputes over the appropriate forms of art, conflicts over how artists might organize themselves and control the rewards of their profession—then the Newport Jazz Festival might be considered one of theMovement’s most revealing 1960 flashpoints, along with the understandably more famous student-led sit-ins. In the unlikely atmosphere of Newport, an older group of black artists tried to translate Martin Luther King’s prophetic vision into a working blueprint of their lives, using the “creative extremism” that King invoked as the Movement’s spirit. While unruly white crowds threw bottles at cops in the streets and forced the festival’s cancellation, a group of musicians led by Charles Mingus and Max Roach held a Newport festival of their own—a “Newport Rebels” festival marked by low budgets, appreciative crowds, and a powerful spirit of musicianly camaraderie. And while the National Guard took control of the region later that weekend, Langston Hughes sat in his room at Newport’s Hotel Viking and started composing a poem. The result was Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, an experimental poetic sequence that set out to bewilder the rioters and white America generally through well-crafted mockery.

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Here is what Hughes wrote of the book-length poetic compostion: “I think one might call the book a single poem because, although it's divided in twelve sections, its thematic unity holds it together, I believe. This poem was written in segments beginning at Newport, at the Newport Jazz Festival in fact, two summers ago. And I suppose that is why, as I wrote most of it, I could hear jazz music behind it. And so when I gave the first reading of some segments of this poem, they were read to jazz. However, the poem may be read with or without music, of course. But for the benefit of those who might like to hear the music that I heard in my mind as I wrote Ask Your Mama, along the margin of the book there are little musical notations. And the leitmotif of the poem, the “Hesitation Blues,” the old-traditional blues, and the little break that is used between some of the verses, “Shave And A Haircut, Fifteen Cents,” those are reproduced musically at the front of the book. And then in the back of the book, as if it were a record, I have a series of liner notes for the unhep, that is, for those who may not quite understand what the poem is about."

You can read the whole poem/jazz composition at this site.

But here are the pages of its first movement so you can see the form it takes:

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