Born into an abolitionist family in Joplin,Missouri,James Langston Hughes's life and work was instrumental in shaping the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.He is best known for his colorful portraits of African American life and was deeply immersed in the world of jazz,an important influence on his writing:"I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street...[these] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Langston Hughes has written of this poem:"[It] is marked by conflicting changes,sudden nuances,sharp and impudent interjections,broken rhythms,and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session,sometimes the popular song,punctuated by the riffs,runs,breaks and disc-tortions of the music of community in transition."