Ask Your Mama

The first time performance artist Kenyon Adams read Langston Hughes’ epic, emotional Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, he was young and not totally floored by the poetry of each word, the urgency and grace in every line, every verse, every mood. He let the poem languish for a few years. And then something happened that would change the way he thought about it forever.

He had the chance to perform the piece with the Ron McCurdy Quartet, which was assembling something called The Langston Hughes Project for YoungArts’ ​“Outside The Box” series in Florida. As the multimedia approach to the poem, not performed during Hughes’ lifetime, took shape before Adams’ eyes, he was captivated by what he saw and heard. He entered a ​“second baptism” that ignited all of his creative senses. He began collaborating with McCurdy, bringing him into his workplace at the Grace Farms Foundation for a collaboration with Alvin Ailey dancer Matthew Rushing. So when McCurdy hooked up with Willie Ruff, one of Adams’s longtime mentors and collaborators, and talked about bringing the Langston Hughes Project to Yale, it seemed natural for Adams to reprise the narrative role.

Friday night the poems — accompanied, as they were intended to be, by music — will flow from Adams’s mouth to a crowd at Morse Recital Hall as part of the Ellington Jazz Series and Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s celebration of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, which turns 75 this year.

Thursday morning Adams connected with me in between his workday at Grace Farms and caring for a newborn at home. With the receiver pressed to his ear and his voice pumping through my computer, we talked about the poem and the project: its explosions of language, layers and layers of historical reference, and what it means for it to be performed now, in New Haven. A selection of our conversation is below.

One thing I am so interested in is your ongoing involvement with this project, and the music inherent in it.

So Willie [Ruff] and I, fortunately for me, have been in a relationship of collaboration for years now. We first met when I was working on Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity at Long Wharf [Theatre], which I was part of for about three seasons. I was writing, rendering some things in the style of work songs and calls, and the Director Sarah Peterson introduced me to this guy, Willie Ruff, and that was one of the more fortunate days of my life. He liked the work I was doing at that time, so we have been working off and on for various projects. I’ve used him as a reference as I’ve been thinking about American musicology and particularly the blues aesthetic. My final project at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music considered the blues as American lament. I’m always checking in with him [Ruff] to make sure I stay on track historically. One can ask Willie Ruff about things that you just won’t find in history books, because he is either writing the history himself, discovering history, or he’ll know tor have known he person you’re talking about personally.

You know, I love this piece. I think Ron’s work with this piece for me kind of was a second baptism — maybe my adult baptism — into Langston Hughes. Having grown up with Hughes’ poetry, I had never spent time with Ask Your Mama, and I think that it’s a poem that is good to read later in life, and also something I believe he wrote later in life.

Let’s talk about the poem itself.

It’s a jazz poem in a sense, in that it is functioning musically and within the jazz idiom. There’s going to be live music all composed by Ron McCurdy to accompany and interact with it; I don’t think it would be right to say it’s separate from the poem. Hughes began writing it [Ask Your Mama] when he was at the Newport Jazz Festival — with music all around him — so the piece itself is musical, it possesses Hughes’ full poetic sensibility, and yet is also a jazz work in its own right. It’s engaging music … and I’m basically interpreting it with the music of Ron McCurdy and thinking about Hughes’s own intentions for the piece.

He’s [Ron] given it a kind of fullness that I think Langston Hughes intends for the piece. It’s not dissimilar from one of Langston Hughes’ plays, where he says ​‘I’m going to write in suggestions for music.’ Or he’ll say: ​‘you know, this can be spoken or sung.’ I think what he’s trying to get you to do is blur that line, because the culture and the community in which this poem was written and from which it comes. All of those things — I think he’s wanting them to be situated as music. That seems his priority and one of his political actions with the piece: The music and the language and all of the subjects are all kind of unified.

So I want to think about the ​“political action” part. How are you thinking of this, performing this, as an articulation of black life and black life mattering?

That’s a huge question. For me, with this performance in particular, I’m trying most of all to be immersed in the piece so that I am serving the piece. You know, Hughes is referencing McCarthy, he’s referencing the Red Scare, which happened a lot to African-American leaders, great leaders that were actually put on [trial]. He himself was actually questioned during the McCarthy trials. I think he was very wounded as an American. He wasn’t blacklisted, but he was certainly kind of bruised, I think. I would have been afraid if I were him. He’s working at the time with the ideas of integration, identity, and representation. I think he sees himself where he is — but at the same time I think he sees a limit as a writer and leader in that fraught context.

But I think his mastery at this time was reaching fruition too, so it’s interesting what I find in engaging this text — it’s to overshoot and overwhelm any limitations. He’s extremely political in this … I think he’s very daring in the piece. There’s a kind of wonderful swagger, and it’s all held together by his mastery of language. The number one thing I take away from it is the virtuosity of the piece.

[Writer and professor] Elizabeth Alexander says that we are now, currently in the midst of a renaissance of African-American art and making, and I really would have to agree with her. Of course, Hughes was immersed in this kind of renaissance … I think if there is a connection between the moments, it would be that. That the virtuosity really takes over, that the sheer brilliance of African Americans overcomes these limitations and these curtailments and the violence, the sheer violence.

I think one of the things about America that’s so shocking to people outside of America is that the lion’s share of American culture created in the 20th century is contributed by its formerly enslaved population, and that population still being under much violence and struggling for full recognition of citizenship and equal protection under the law. Just the basics. And sort of equal assignment of human dignity.

At the same time, the cultural contribution of that people is so towering. And I think what you see in this poem also, the names and the lists — it’s like a roll call of the contributions of the African diaspora of his day. So he’s thinking about the broader diaspora, he’s talking about … all of the uprisings and revolutionaries, that the community of the diaspora constitutes a kind of whole and interactive community, across time and geography, including the continent of Africa but also in the Caribbean. He’s talking about Toussaint L’Ouverture, Patrice Lumumba, Azekiwe. I think that there’s an interesting contrast … all of this beauty and virtuosity … and the piece itself doing this kind of dance and shining in its own light … in the face of such violence.

It’s a strange society in that sense, right? And that’s still the situation. I don’t have equal protection under the law, you know. I’m African-American. And I’m a contributing citizen!

These pieces are incredibly beautiful, incredibly emotional. So for you, thinking about the concept of grace in art, as in, presenting these gracefully and with intention, what’s the place you go when you’re rehearsing these? 

That grace with a small g is the poetry. It’s like the music itself. And Ron has done that with the music. I can immerse myself in that. The piece really carries me along, honestly. It’s not exactly as intense as a [James] Baldwin play, but … the attitude behind this whole piece, sort of the posture of the piece, is based on a kind of colloquial tradition. It’s very much like Shakespeare’s comedies, how you have these characters that come on stage and really get at what’s going on in society, and really poke at people and really take some digs. It reminds me also of Dante’s Inferno, the way Hughes really goes after his contemporaries, naming names. Quite bold, in fact.

The piece is called Ask Your Mama, and so it kind of intimates, you know, yo’ mama jokes and ​“I’m gonna be cracking on your mama,” but there’s a line, and you have it recurring. Your mama. Or, ask your mama. But your mama is your nation. Right? Your country is your mom. So there’s this very interesting friction between the nation as your homeland — you are American, but there’s a tension of the homeland not exactly being a kind of a mothering environment. So I think that the piece itself … kind of allows for people to not even address, but to criticize. It’s kind of like Louis Armstrong’s horn. People were definitely willing to listen to the horn. And he comes onstage and people thought he was very comical when he would come on stage, but they used to say: ​“There’s nothing funny about that horn.”

So I think that the piece has a lot of that in it.

Performing this in New Haven on Friday, are you thinking about the similarities between the moment when Hughes was writing this and when you’re writing now? I can’t help think of Trump, of this election cycle, when we start talking about McCarthyism. 

I’ve been so much just trying to immerse myself because the language carries me along. Just like Shakespeare. I’ve had a lot of Shakespeare in my mouth and my body, throughout my body, throughout my life, I’ve had whole roles in my body — memorized a lot of it, and there’s just … no other text, musical or poetic, has had so much mobility for me…. It moves me along, almost like waves or some type of railroad track that I just need to get on and it moves me through. One of the things I’m trying to do is make sure I’m on that train. The more I do that, the more insights I get into where Langston Hughes was, and also, the kind of reasons that Ron McCurdy chose to take up this piece, and that he emphasized this piece as part of his own journey.

I mean, where we are right now, and why do this piece — well, it’s interesting. The Beinecke Library houses one one of the most significant collections of African-American arts and letters. And yet Yale has famously been a difficult place for many African-Americans. That’s this piece! And I think it’s this country. I haven’t precisely been thinking about Trump in my preparation. I have been thinking about violence. It’s hard not to think about violence if you have a black body right now. You are dealing with facing violence. I mean, I am facing violence. I do not enjoy equal protection under the law. So to embody this piece now … it’s more like medicine. This piece is potent and therapeutic.

I think that some of its references will be lost on some people — though probably not on those over 50. You know, it’s like you would need an encyclopedia or Google to even read this piece. He [Hughes] put some liner notes in at the end, but he’s referencing so many different figures from very specific times. It’s interesting, there’s a lot about the Niagara Movement, which was the beginnings of the NAACP. He says a lot about the great figures of that time. He’s talking about also these enemies … Faubus, Eastland, and Patterson, southern politicians of his day opposing justice. He’s really giving you, I think, a kind of Kara Walker silhouette. But if you don’t stop and stare at the silhouette, it’s kind of charming.

I think what’s not to be missed, what’s not to be missed, is that he’s equally celebrating as lamenting, and that is the black experience in this country, and perhaps in this world. You are celebrating Obama, and lamenting the fact that he is interrupted on the House floor. So there’s a constant awareness that … there’s no escape from that.

Segregation and Jim Crow was a violence. Lynching, red-lining and mass incarceration are a
violence. It just so happens that amidst that violence, black folk continued to live. And not just live, but to contribute. And not just contribute, but to transform. I think that that’s what the piece is really all about. I think, also, that is why now, you do have a renaissance of African-American artists. At the same time, you do have present violence facing African-Americans. And this has never not been. There in the midst of a renaissance, all he is celebrating and illuminating, yet he is also in the midst of a violence.

This is perhaps the thing to try to understand about what the blues aesthetic is capable of intuiting, or offering as an insight, or offering as a modality not only of survival — it’s a modality of being. It’s a kind of ontology, it’s a way of thriving and living as humans, of offering human being-ness in very vital ways. If everyone paid attention to these kinds of modalities and not just relegate then as sub-categories within universal experience (or alleged experience of the African Diasporic peoples), I think that we could be a more whole society, in the U.S. and all of the places that the African diaspora has touched. I think that Langston Hughes demonstrated this truth in his work and in his life … and certainly demonstrated it in this piece, with all the virtuosity you would expect from an American master.

The Langston Hughes Project performs Friday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Morse Recital Hall, 470 College St. Tickets start at $20, $10 for students. Click here for more information. To hear an excerpt, click on or download the audio above.