Month: December 2008

We can thank the Dutch for more than great flower bulbs. They’ve also given us Champagne Charlie, a rootsy, bluesy band that does great renditions of Depression-era hits. The music helps with the pain. Really.

Waitin’ on Roosevelt, lyrics by Langston Hughes.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. African Americans who supported left-wing parties, however, were more likely to be critical. Langston Hughes, a playwright, poet, and novelist, became a socialist in the 1930s. Although he did not join the Communist Party, he spent a year in the Soviet Union and published his works in magazines sympathetic to liberal, socialist, and Communist causes. In Hughes’s “Ballad of Roosevelt,” which appeared in the New Republic in 1934, the poet criticized the unfulfilled promises that FDR had made to the poor. Hughes’s style in this poem showed his distinctive merging of traditional verse with black artistic forms like blues and jazz.

Bonus track: The ever more upbeat Breadline Blues: