Far Out 40: The greatest songs from the Harlem Renaissance
From the 1910s to the mid-1930s, a small neighbourhood in upper Manhattan played host to an array of pioneering Black musicians, writers, painters and thinkers. Together, this tight-knit community pushed the boundaries of American culture, giving birth to perhaps the most fruitful cultural movement in modern history: the Harlem Renaissance.
So, why Harlem? Originally envisioned as an upper-class white neighbourhood, by the 1880s, the district was almost entirely abandoned. With hundreds of empty buildings and nobody to occupy them, landlords welcomed the arrival of middle-class Black families from so-called Black Bohemia. Following a failed attempt by white residents to ban these new arrivals, Harlem became the number one destination for migrants fleeing the southern United States. This was the era of the Great Migration: a mass exodus of more than six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South.
By the outbreak of the First World War, what had once been a predominantly white neighbourhood occupied by Jewish and Italian migrants was home to Black Americans from the Deep South, Caribbean expatriates and Puerto Ricans. By the late 1910s, it was the epicentre of a new cultural movement. While the playlist below focuses on the movement’s musical offerings, the Harlem Renaissance was about more than horn-blowing. It encompassed art, literature, politics and activism – paving the way for the civil rights movement of the 1940s and ’50s. Harlem offered a network of support for such writers as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes while inspiring artists like Augusta Savage and James Van Der Zee. Of course, Jazz sat at the centre of it all, with emigree musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington pioneering an infectious brand of dance music that came to define the jazz age.
The music of the Renaissance was not only a celebration of heritage, it was a way of reconceptualising the image white America had of its Black population. Jazz quickly bled into broader American culture, moving beyond the confines of Harlem to inform the literature, art, music and fashions of the following three decades of American cultural life. Below, we’ve compiled a 40-track playlist featuring the essential songs of the Harlem Renaissance – from Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller to Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. Enjoy.
