After the heavy saturation of blues performing in the 1920s and the application of various elements– rhythm, syncopation, call and response, lyrics, and so on– to avant-garde literature, Black and white, of the time, the country descended into a prolonged Depression in the 1930s. Blues recording ground nearly to a halt for several years, though conditions that fed into the blues were in ample supply. The music was changing with the amalgamation of swing band elements and boogie-woogie with the rural blues, producing a jumping hybrid that used blues structures and lyrics with a big-band lilt. The move to the Left, especially in the artistic community, found literary blues having a decidedly Leftist feel in writers such as Langston Hughes, holding over from the twenties and Frank Marshall Davis emerging in the thirties. There were still the musical artists from various genres, including classical, who made use of the blues, and movies, for example, reflected the music as well. It was a new kind of hot music– and thus, hot music literature– that was in the offing.

This chapter traces one of the formative transitions of the Harlem Renaissance in its literary encounter with jazz and blues culture, arguing that its aesthetic was not only shaped by the music’s vital expressive forms but also its means of production, the technical recording apparatus itself. Many Harlem Renaissance writers were motivated in their artistic efforts to preserve the folk culture they felt was rapidly being lost. To do so, they paradoxically harnessed the very recording technologies they believed were hastening the demise of folk culture. Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others engaged with popular music and its processes of recording – its possibilities of preservation, representation, and collectivity, but also displacement and alienation – in part, as a way of understanding the craft of writing as a related technology and their own predicament as writers within commercial literary markets requiring specific kinds of raced performances.