zz sound particularly well. When Armstrong appeared in
Chicago with King Oliver as the band's second trumpeter, he was
immediately recognized as a jazz trumpet virtuoso, and his playing sent
an electric shock through the jazz world.

The most famous jazz musician and composer to appear in New York City
during and after the Negro Renaissance was Duke Ellington. His well-known
theme song "Take the A Train" made reference to the subway line which
went to Harlem. By the time jazz had reached Harlem the Negro Renaissance
was in full swing. This renaissance, unlike previous art produced by
Negroes, consciously built on the Afro-American folk tradition.

Langston Hughes, the most prolific writer of the renaissance, wrote a
kind of manifesto for the movement. He said that he was proud to be a
black artist. Further, he said that he was not writing to win the
approval of white audiences. At the same time he claimed that he and the
other young Negro artists were not attempting to gain the approval of
black audiences. They were writing to express their inner souls, and they
were not ashamed that those souls were black. If what they wrote pleased
either whites or blacks, Hughes said, they were happy. It did not matter
to them if it did not.

In "Minstrel Man", Hughes expressed the inner emotions of the
stereotyped, well-behaved Negro which white America thought it knew so
well:

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You did not think
I suffer after
I've held my pain
So long.

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
You do not hear
My inner cry:
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die.

Claude McKay expresses an inner anger rather than a secret pain felt by a
contained and somewhat more sophisticated Negro responding to segregation:

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

In still more defiant tones, McKay expresses the aggressive response
which many Negroes made during the race riots of 1919:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain...

Nevertheless, Langston Hughes ma