Jazz Quartet
by Debra Hurd

Jazz Band
By Frank Marshall Davis

Play that thing, you jazz mad fools!

Boil a skyscraper with a jungle

Dish it to ’em sweet and hot-

Ahhhhhhhhh

Rip it open then sew it up, jazz band!

Thick bass notes from a moon faced drum

Saxophones moan, banjo strings hum

High thin notes from the cornet’s throat

Trombone snorting, bass horn snorting

Short tan notes from the piano

And the short tan notes from the piano

Plink plank plunk a plunk

Chopin gone screwy, Wagner with the blues

Plink plank plunk a plunk

Got a date with Satan–ain’t no time to lose

Plink plank plunk a plunk

Strut it in Harlem, let Fifth Avenue shake it slow

Plink plank plunk a plunk

Ain’t goin’ to heaven nowhow–

crowd up there’s too slow . . .

Plink plank plunk a plunk

Plunk

Do that thing, jazz band!

Whip it to a jelly

Sock it, rock it; heat it, beat it; then fling it at ’em

Let the jazz stuff fall like hail on king and truck driver, queen and

laundress, lord and laborer, banker and bum

Let it fall in London, Moscow, Paris, Hongkong, Cairo, Buenos Aires,

Chicago, Sydney

Let it rub hard thighs, let it be molten fire in the veins of dancers

Make ’em shout a crazy jargon of hot hosannas to a fiddle-faced jazz

god

Send Dios, Jehovah, Gott, Allah, Buddha past in a high stepping

cake walk

Do that thing, jazz band!

Your music’s been drinking hard liquor

Got shanghaied and it’s fightin’ mad

Stripped to the waist feein’ ocean liner bellies

Big burly bibulous brute

Poet hands and bone crusher shoulders-

Black sheep or white?

Hey, Hey!

Pick it, papa!

Twee twa twee twa twa

Step on it, black boy

Do re mi fa sol la ti do

Boomp boomp

Play that thing, you jazz mad fools!

Hello, and welcome back to Poetry Wednesday 7/01/09. You can sign in today and take the tour thru Thursday, so take your time.

I’ll be your hostess again this week. My sister, Sans Souci, has completed her poetry book, and is taking a break, but she will check in.

Before we get started, please make sure that your post has a link to get back to this page to make it easier to take the tour:

1) Copy and paste the following link that I have provided for you from this page to somewhere on your poetry post.

Link back to the Poetry Wednesday tour on Laurita’s page

2) Leave the link of your poetry post in the comments section below. This is the link guests will click on to read your poem.

A central figure in African-American literary history, Frank Marshall Davis was a poet whose work drew on and put a personal stamp on many of the trends in black poetry of the 1930s and 1940s. He was influenced by jazz and tried to evoke its rhythms in words. He drew detailed portraits of urban African-American life. And like Langston Hughes and many of his other contemporaries, he was a social activist who used literature to illustrate injustice in no uncertain terms.

Davis was also a pioneering figure in the field of African-American journalism. Insufficient recognition of the role Chicago writers played in African-American cultural life contributed to a long-lasting underestimation of Davis’s work, as did his move to Hawaii in midlife, under threat from a growing wave of anticommunist repression. Davis was rediscovered enthusiastically, however, by politically oriented black writers of the later twentieth century.

Frank Marshall Davis was born on December 31, 1905, in Arkansas City, Kansas. The violence of small-town Midwestern life was unrelenting; Davis was told by teachers and townspeople that blacks were inferior, and when he was five a group of white boys tried to lynch him. He took heart, though, when he first heard a new music that was spreading across the South. “The blues? We were formally introduced when I was eight; even then I had the feeling we weren’t strangers,” Davis wrote in his autobiographical Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet. “So when the blues grabbed me and held on, it was like meeting a long-lost brother.”

Davis graduated from Arkansas City High School and moved to Wichita, Kansas, around 1924, taking journalism classes at Friends College and at Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State Universityof Agricultural and Applied Science). As a freshman there, he faced the option of writing either an essay or a poem for an English class and took what he thought was the easy way out. The professor liked his poem, and Davis ran off to the library to write more. Hooked on writing, Davis moved to Chicago in January of 1927 and soon had some stories published in National Magazine. Some of his work is published under his pen name Frank Boganey–the last name of his mother’s second husband. In April of 1927 Davis began his journalism career as an editor and columnist with the Chicago Evening Bulletin.

In Obama’s own book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had “some modest notoriety once,” was “a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago…” but was now “pushing eighty.” He writes about “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self” giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.

This “Frank” is none other than Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now considered by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II-even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.” Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.

Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995? That’s not plausible since Obama refers to him as a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and says he saw a book of his black poetry.

The communists knew who “Frank” was, and they know who Obama is. In fact, one academic who travels in communist circles understands the significance of the Davis-Obama relationship.

Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”

Working for the Chicago Whip, the Gary (Indiana) American, the Associated Negro Press, and (from 1931 to 1934) the Atlanta World, Davis became a jack-of-all-trades. “I served not only as straight news reporter but as rewrite man, editor, editorial writer, political commentator, theatrical and jazz columnist, sports writer, and occasionally news photographer,” Davis wrote in his autobiography. As managing editor of the Atlanta World he transformed the paper from a weekly to a thrice-weekly and finally to a daily publication. All the while, he was writing poetry, and in 1934 he moved back to Chicago from Atlanta. The year 1935 saw the publication of Davis’s first book, Black Man’s Verse, by Black Cat Press. Davis followed up that volume with I Am the American Negro two years later.

Those books made Davis’s reputation and cemented his relationships with Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and other leading black writers whom he met while participating in the federal Works Progress Administration Writers’ Project and other organizations. In 1937 Davis received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and through World War II he continued to earn a living as a journalist and editor with the Associated Negro Press. His poetry involved itself with various subjects and sources; two series of poems set in a graveyard and describing its occupants (one in each of his first two books) seemed influenced by a parallel section of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. He depicted urban scenes and wrote occasional lyric poems of great beauty. “Peddling/From door to door/Night sells/Black bags of peppernint stars/Heaping cones of vanilla moon,” he wrote in one poem.

Most often, though, Davis was identified with militant poems. His works dealt with lynching, poverty, and the other grinding conditions under which African Americans live, and he indicted the hypocrisy of white America repeatedly. Several poems, including “‘Onward Christian Soldiers,'” took direct aim at white violence on a global scale; “Day by day // Black folk learn // Rather than with // A heathen spear // ‘Tis holier to die // By a Christian gun.” These works made a strong impression, but some critics shied away from them; Hughes (as quoted by Davis biographer John Edgar Tidwell) offered the even-handed but cautionary assessment that “when [Davis’s] poems are poetry, they are powerful.”

Davis broadened his activities into many areas of black culture and society in the 1930s and 1940s. He used his newspaper platform to call for integration of the sports world, and he began to engage himself with community organizing efforts, starting a Chicago labor newspaper (the Star) toward the end of World War II. In 1945 he taught one of the first jazz history courses in the United States at the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago. He briefly joined the Communist Party, although he had disparaged the efforts of Communist organizers while living in the South in the 1930s and later downplayed the extent of his involvement.

Moved to Hawaii

Still, Davis’s leftist associations were strong enough to attract unwelcome attention from the government after the war, and by the time his third book, 47th Street: Poems, was published in 1948, he was under pressure from the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives. That book, often considered Davis’s best, aimed at a readership that extended beyond African-American circles and offered portraits of a broad range of Chicagoans. On vacation that summer in Hawaii with his second wife, Chicago socialite Helen Canfield Davis, he decided to stay on in Honolulu and remained there for the rest of his life. The interracial marriage lasted 24 years but finally ended in divorce. Davis first became a father at age 44, and the couple raised five children.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, young African-American writers (especially those affiliated with the Black Arts Movement) began to rediscover Davis’s work. He visited Howard University in Washington to give a poetry reading in 1973, marking the first time he had seen the U.S. mainland in 25 years. His work began to show up in anthologies, and in the late 1970s he published two more small volumes of poetry, Jazz Interludes: Seven Musical Poems and Awakening and Other Poems. Davis died in Honolulu on July 26, 1987, just before a group of young scholars became interested in documenting his life and work. Livin’ the Blues was published posthumously in 1992. It was assembled from Davis’s notes by John Edgar Tidwell, who in 2002 edited a publication of Davis’s collected works, Black Moods.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/frank-davis

Source: http://obamareport.blogspot.com/2008/04/barack-obamas-communist-mentor-frank.html

So…how late’ll ya play ’til ?

The tour starts here with you.

[mp3j track=”everydayihavetheblues.mp3″]

Sans Souci’s post for this week is here:

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