For this, characteristics of African music will be first reviewed.

That is to say, if rap directly comes from the music that the first slaves to arrive in North American soil brought with them. Today, his many works and his contribution to American letters continue to be cherished and celebrated around the world.The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate, if possible, whether there is any relation between rap and African-American music.

A cross section of his work was published in 1958 as The Langston Hughes Reader a Selected Poems first appeared in 1959 and a Collected Poems in 1994. He wrote poetry, short stories, autobiography, song lyrics, essays, humor, and plays. From 1926 until his death in 1967, Hughes devoted his time to writing and lecturing.

by his alma mater during his lifetime, he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1935), a Rosenwald Fellowship (1940), and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1947). In 1943, he was awarded an honorary Litt.D. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1929. In 1925, he was awarded the First Prize for Poetry from the magazine Opportunity for “The Weary Blues,” which gave its title to his first book of poems, published in 1926. His first poem published in a nationally known magazine was “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which appeared in Crisis in 1921. After graduation from high school, he spent a year in Mexico with his father, then a year studying at Columbia University. LANGSTON HUGHES was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. The poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death in 1967 and represent work from his entire career, including 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' 'The Weary Blues,' 'Still Here,' 'Song for a Dark Girl,' 'Montage of a Dream Deferred,' and 'Refugee in America.' It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out 'wonder and pain and terror-and the marrow of the bone of life.' The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who 'rushed the boots of Washington' of musicians on Lenox Avenue of the poor and the lovesick of losers in 'the raffle of night.' They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. A Classic Collection of Poems by a Master of American Verse (Vintage Classics)įrom the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.

Selected poems of langston hughes