Alabama

Abstract

For Langston Hughes, “Daybreak in Alabama” was to have been a future composition, a to-be-written tune that, when it finally arrived, would be a space of prettiness, a song falling from the night as stars fall on Alabama. Perhaps the poem’s futurity was occasioned by its utopian hopes. In Hughes’s dream of composition, Alabama was to be lyric space, where red necks and brown arms worked together in freedom. In Hughes’s dream work, the intended theme of Alabama was to be a music “rising out of the ground like swamp mist.”¹ A contingent composition, it was to await his becoming a composer. It may be instructive to note, briefly in passing, that there is nothing said here of lyrics. It is the music itself that is to be of (both in that most insistent sense of aboutness and in the sense of being of a place) daybreak in Alabama. It was to remain for a later composer, Ricky Ian Gordon, to bring “Daybreak in Alabama” to a score, in a piece recorded by Audra McDonald for her 1998 collection Way Back to Paradise. Here, it was Hughes’s past lyrics that were to be conjoined to a subsequent melody, leaving us, we who listen, lodged in one of those curious folds in tense, one of those proverbial verbal turns whereby the future bites its own anterior, another case of, to borrow a line from Al Young, the song turning back on itself. Gordon’s composition has much to recommend it.

When I get to be a composer I’m gonna write me some music about Daybreak in Alabama

Langston Hughes