Van Vechten
Bessie Smith.
Langston Hughes and Gladys Bentley greet you at the entrance to the Beinecke Library. So does Cab Calloway, conducting his orchestra at the Cotton Club. Augusta Savage is there, too, maybe about to create her next sculpture.
Walk a little farther and you almost hear not only the voices of the luminaries of the past, but those of their neighbors: People going out for a night on the town. People dancing in the apartment next door. People just trying to make rent, any way they can.
“Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaisssance and the Beinecke Library” draws from the extensive James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection — which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year — to offer insights both broad and deep into the furious artistic output from Harlem from the end of World War I into the 1930s. A lot of famous names are embedded in the history of the artistic movement, from Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston to Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
The gift of the exhibit is to both call attention to the lasting impact of their artistic achievements and to point out that they didn’t do it alone. “Gather Out of Star-Dust” offers glimpses into the community that surrounded them, of writers, artists, and musicians, but also business owners, publishers, patrons, customers, and people just trying to get by that somehow combined to make for a place that produced some of the best in American letters, theater, and music.
The exhibit runs until Apr. 17.
In the realm of music, Harlem during the Renaissance was a hotbed of clubs and theaters, as shown in artist E. Simms Campbell’s delightful map of the neighborhood from 1932. There are places on it now immortalized in pop culture — the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom — but the map shows that they were just two of many. At Club Hot-Cha, Campbell writes, “nothing happens before 2 a.m. Ask for Clarence.” At the Radium Club, there’s a “big breakfast dance every Sunday morning 4 or 5 a.m.” On a certain stretch of Lenox Avenue, Campbell writes, “there are clubs opening and closing at all times … too many to put them all on the map.”
In addition to Ellington and Calloway, this music scene could lay claim to shaping Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and a very long list of others who made their permanent marks on American music. And, as curator Melissa Barton pointed out, the explosion of creativity — and intense interest in that creativity that crossed geographic and color lines — went hand in hand with an interest in documenting and archiving the African-American culture of the past. Author, activist, and lawyer James Weldon Johnson himself collected and published The Book of American Negro Spirituals in 1925 and a second volume soon thereafter. W.C. Handy, by then already an icon of American music in his own right, published his autobiography, Father of the Blues, in 1941.
Van Vechten
Cab Calloway.
The Beinecke’s exhibit reveals, though, the rich context of these more monumental achievements. Within the library’s holdings are hundreds of blues 78s collected by Carl Van Vechten, a writer, photographer, scenester, and apparently avid music fan. Like the more urban music of jazz in Harlem and elsewhere, the more rural music of the blues experienced a spike in popularity. Van Vechten wrote an article for Vanity Fair in 1926 about blues singers Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, and Ethel Waters, which helped propel their careers — Bessie Smith’s, as it turned out, toward a place in the canon of American music. But Smith at the time was just a very popular and talented singer whom Langston Hughes happened to cross paths with later.
“She remembered you and your wife but didn’t seem at all concerned as to whether articles were written about her or not,” Hughes relayed in a typed letter to Van Vechten (delightfully, part of the exhibit). “And her only comment on the art of the Blues was they had put her ‘in de money.’”
Tracing the friendship of the two men also leads to the discovery of an ugly truth: that segregation and discrimination had a heavy hand even in Harlem. As the exhibit points out, of the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Small’s Paradise — the clubs at the top of the game — “Small’s was the only one of these three that allowed African-American customers on its floor.”
“Harlem clubs are disgracefully white,” Hughes wrote to friend and novelist Claude McKay. “The only way Negroes set in nowadays is to come with white folks, whereas it used to be the other way around.” Curator Barton related the story that Van Vechten had once arrived at the Cotton Club with a mixed group of friends, only to be turned away at the door. He boycotted the club after that.
Courtesy Beinecke Rare Books Library
Maybe most insightful and delightful of the exhibit’s ingredients are pieces that weren’t intended to survive at all. In one vitrine is a collection of what look like business cards. It turns out that they’re Langston Hughes’s collection of invitations to house rent parties. As the name suggests, these were parties that people threw when they realized they wouldn’t be able to make rent that month. So they turned their apartments into clubs for an evening. The tenants got libations and musicians — anybody from a solo piano player to a three-piece combo. For 10 to 15 cents apiece, the people who came could party all night.
To invite people to these parties, Harlem residents sometimes availed themselves of a printer who walked the streets with a mobile printing press. He printed the cards with the names and addresses of the people throwing the party. But they usually called it something else — a social party, a beer brawl, a social whist, a chitterling strut.
Hughes was charmed by those cards and kept over 70 of them. It’s easy to see why. There’s so much everyday music in them, so much life. They tell the stories of how people made ends meet by relying on their neighbors and having a good time doing it. Look at those cards and you can imagine what those parties were like, and how enough of them could turn a neighborhood into a community that we’re still listening to 100 years later.
“Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaisssance and the Beinecke Library” is on exhibition at the Beinecke Library until Apr. 17. Visit the library’s website for details about hours. Admission is free. Stay tuned for a second article about the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection’s deep dive into the writing side of the Harlem Renaissance.