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  • Chapter 13 - “Symbols from Within”: Charting the Nation’s Regions in James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones

  • from Part III - Re-mapping the New Negro
  • Edited by Rachel Farebrother, Miriam Thaggert, University of Iowa
  • Book:
    A History of the Harlem Renaissance
    Published online:
    20 January 2021
    Print publication:
    04 February 2021, pp 233-251

  • Summary

    Using God’s Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson’s major collection of poetry from the New Negro Renaissance, this chapter outlines the author’s view of the tension between American popular culture and vernacular African American expressive forms, presenting his theory of poetic expression and linguistic transcription through call and response and the author’s close relationship to this work. Johnson viewed popular culture ambivalently, as a necessary yet potentially reductive force. In its greatest potential, it could form a people’s poetry, and in so doing create a distinctly racial art that was also national. God’s Trombones was therefore more than a simple linguistic project, it was an endeavor to draw upon “symbols from within” African American folk and vernacular forms, and also from within the nation’s regions, to advance a national African American culture.