Note on Commercial Theater and Its Challenge for Women’s History Month, 2025
It’s Margaret Bonds’s final art song on a text of Langston Hughes. It’s a blues essay about the blues. It’s a searing critique of cultural appropriation. It brings a powerful challenge for this Women’s History Month. It’s now finally published, some sixty-five years after it was composed. And it has a story.
Here is that story in seven scenes and two codas:
SCENE ONE (the long one!). In the mid-1930s, as the U.S. and the world grappled with the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched Federal Project Number One (Federal One), whose constituent projects included the Federal Music Project and the Federal Theater Project (FMP and FTP). The FMP and FTP generated tens of thousands of new musical compositions and plays that were performed before millions. Although they offered work and recognition for African American artistic notables including Margaret Bonds, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, Florence Price, and William Grant Still, the Projects’ upper-level administration and aesthetic outlook were overwhelmingly white, and much of the theatrical work consisted of staples of white Euro-American culture adapted to be, so administrators hoped, more accessible to Black Americans – projects such as Voodoo Macbeth and Romey and Julie (both based on Shakespeare; the Chicago production of the latter provided the context for twenty-three-year-old Margaret Bonds’s first incidental music in the summer of 1936), and The Swing Mikado (after Gilbert and Sullivan). These productions excluded Black people from artistic culture less than had previously been the case, and they were commercially successful – but at the end of the day, they were essentially exercises in cultural appropriation, exploiting Black talent and Black cultural production for white profit while employing degrading stereotypes of African Americans themselves.
SCENE TWO: That didn’t sit well with Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes, who befriended one another in mid-1936. Already in May 1937, Bonds wrote to Hughes describing a similar project (Albert Crews’s Let My People Go, written and produced at Bonds’s alma mater, Northwestern University) as “a lousy Negro play written by a white man.” And in September 1939, working in retreat at the Hollow Hills Farm in Carmel, California, Hughes penned the first version of his poem Note on Commercial Theater – a scorching critique of white cultural appropriation of Black art and a resounding affirmation of Black agency and self-affirmation. The text, which singled out Voodoo Macbeth and The Swing Mikado as well as blues performed by white people and symphonic orchestrations of spirituals, was published in the official journal of the NAACP, The Crisis, in March 1940. Here is an excerpt from Bonds’s letter to Hughes, and here is Hughes’s “Note on Commercial Art” as it stood in March 1940 (note the teaser . . .)
SCENE THREE. Despite the large readership of The Crisis and the incisiveness of Hughes’s critique, white cultural appropriation of Black genius didn’t slow after the poem’s publication (it never has). Another notable instance occurred in the musical Carmen Jones, adapted from Bizet’s Carmen, which opened on Broadway on December 2, 1943. Its score was published that same year (New York: Chappell), and it was so successful that it was adapted into a film starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte by Otto Preminger in 1954. The play and the movie both construct Blackness through an all-too-obvious white lens, taking the cultural appropriations of the 1930s to new heights of commercialized exploitation.
SCENE FOUR. For obvious reasons, the success of Carmen Jones between 1943 and 1954 chafed Langston Hughes. So when he recorded his iconic album The Weary Blues with Langston Hughes on March 17 and 18, 1958, he brought back the “Note on Commercial Art” again – slightly expanded, now retitled simply “Commercial Theatre,” and combined with the accompaniment of a hard-hitting modern jazz accompaniment delivered by Leonard Feather, Charles Mingus, and others. There’s little of the blues about the music of this track until Red Allen’s final muted-trumpet solo, which leads into Hughes's iconic poem "The Weary Blues." But hearing Hughes’s own voice delivering his words is a real experience – and the dramatic pause before the final lines of "Commercial Theatre" is unforgettable:
SCENE FIVE. Back in 1942, the year before Carmen Jones opened, Hughes had published a collection of what he called “light verse” under the title Shakespeare in Harlem – a collection that met with mixed reviews but was a synthesis of the experimental blues poetry that had made Hughes’s fame in the ’20s and the activist poetry that had characterized much of his more recent work. Shakespeare in Harlem was devoted to the authentic portrayal of Black life in Black communities. And although that collection didn’t include the “Note on Commercial Theater” (or “Art”) when it was published in 1942, when Hughes in 1955 began a collaboration with white playwright Robert Glenn to script a one-act dramatization under the same title, they inserted the “Note on Commercial Theater” as the first term of the argument. At this point the poem was spoken-word only, perhaps with a taped recording of a the spiritual “Deep River” – but it held pride of place and offered an incisive start to Hughes’s theatrical enactment of the poetry of Black life: the first thing audiences heard when the play opened in Dallas in November 1955 was Hughes’s ringing denunciation of white commercial appropriations of the cultural production of black folk.
Here's a typed set of press reviews of the Dallas production that Bonds kept in her papers (note the cigarette burn!):
SCENE SIX. Re-enter Margaret Bonds, who had sporadically collaborated with Hughes in several projects over the previous decades and whose own social-justice projects drew on Bonds's pride in her African American heritage and her enthusiasm for promoting Black voices and Black art. When plans were laid for Shakespeare in Harlem to open at Lucille Lortel’s White Barn Theatre in Norwalk, Connecticut, in August 1959, it had been decided that Bonds would compose a set of cues for it. Some of that music was in place when the play opened at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) on 27 October 1959, and because Hughes felt that her music added much to the play, by December Bonds was working hard on adding more of these brilliant (and still-unpublished!) small-ensemble cues. A new production of the play opened at the Theatre de Lys with all of Bonds’s cues intact on 10 February 1960 – but in this version, too, the “Note on Commercial Theater” was spoken rather than sung – although it now certainly included an inserted tape recording of the spiritual “Deep River” and led into musical cues created by Bonds.
Here's “Note on Commercial Theater” at the opening of the play in Bonds’s annotated typescript of the 1960 production of Shakespeare in Harlem:
SCENE SEVEN. Margaret Bonds had actively promoted Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem play, and – as we’ve seen from her 1936 letter about Crews’s “lousy negro play by a white man” – she had been voicing her protests against white cultural appropriation at least as long as Hughes had, maybe longer. She identified with the message and the strength of Hughes’s “Note on Commercial Theater” – and, what’s more, she had set his other words to music so many times and with such success over the previous decades that she must have known that if she set those words to her tones, asserting her authority as Hughes’s musical voice, the results would be magic.
So that’s what she did. In 1960 she wrote her own setting of the “Note on Commercial Theater” – a characteristically Bondsian hybrid cast as an art song that's also deeply indebted to the blues as that style had come to exist by the early 1960s. On 29 March 1960, some seven weeks after the new production’s opening, she wrote to Hughes that she had composed a setting of the poem that was “very near finished,” stating that she had written it with mezzo-soprano Betty Allen (1927-2009) in mind and suggesting that Hughes might include the song “as a reprise” in future productions of the play; in the latter scenario, soprano Alma Lillie Hubbard (1895-1970) was eager to sing it. By 1961 she had dedicated the piece to Georgia Davis (1923-2016), and she sent Hughes a fair-copy manuscript as a birthday present with the inscription: “To Langston for his birthday, Feb. 1, 1961 / from his friend, Margaret.” By this point her song had apparently been performed, for on 4 February 1961 Hughes’s assistant, George Houston Bass (1938-90), wrote to Bonds that he hoped he would “get a chance to hear ‘YOU’VE TAKEN MY BLUES’ soon” because he “hear[d] that it's great. And from several persons too.” Then Bass appended the words from which the title of this post is taken: “Probably another message from the gods to man via MARGARET BONDS.”
Here's the beginning of Bonds’s autograph gifted to Hughes, followed by George Bass’s note about having heard the song:
And that’s it. No further performances of Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” are known to have been given during her lifetime and it turned out to be her final art song on a text of Hughes. At her death in 1972 it remained in manuscript, unpublished and (aside from that gifted manuscript) beyond the reach of the musical world. White cultural appropriations of Black art continued unabated and even escalated, but Bonds’s musical rejoinder was unable to be heard because it remained in manuscript and in private possession, well beyond the reach of performers and obscure also to scholars.
But then come the two codas – both snapshots in the posthumous afterlife of the work that George Houston Bass described as “probably another message from the gods to man via MARGARET BONDS.”
CODA 1: In December 2018I edited Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” as a part of my ongoing project of researching the many still-unpublished works among the more than 400 that Bonds penned. Struck by the composition, I shared it with pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers, who had reached out to me some time earlier because she had gotten wind of my work on Bonds and Florence Price and was curious to learn more about their piano/vocal works. Initially, Jeanne-Minette (who was then based in Antwerp, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts) set the edition aside because of her busy schedule – but then, when society shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she found herself with the time to return to it. She and her husband, Andrew Richards, invited the brilliant baritone Justin Hopkins to their flat to seek musical comfort and joy in a world where those vitally human necessities were in deadly short supply. Of that encounter was born the idea for a series of professional-quality music videos of unknown music by African American composers, a series that would use that music to offer comfort by reminding viewers of our shared humanity and the hope that would come of a challenge to learn yet more such unknown musical treasures. That series, titled Songs of Comfort, dropped its first episode in June of 2020. And on 18 January 2021 Justin and the Songs of Comfort Team dropped their stunning music video of Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” – the first known performance since 1961. Here is that video of the song’s posthumous premiere, prepared from my pre-publication edition:
CODA 2: In a blog post that attended the launch of the Songs of Comfort video I announced that the edition of Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” would be published later in 2021. That annoucement turned out to be overly ambitious. But this week, as of 3 March 2025 – the 112th anniversary of Margaret Bonds’s birth – the score has finally been published as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series at Hildegard Publishing Company, thanks to the good offices of that firm’s President, Ellie Armsby, and Vice-President, Nancy Hale. Margaret Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” had to wait fifty-three years from the composer’s death and sixty-four years from the last previous documented performance to make its way into the world in print, but now it’s out. You can find and order it as a digital download here.
At the outset of this post I mentioned that Bonds’s Note on Commercial Theater brings a challenge for this Women’s History Month. Let me close by explaining that remark:
Thus far, in its posthumous afterlife Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” has been (to my knowledge) performed only by men’s voices. While that is a wonderful thing in its own way, the fact remains that Margaret Bonds herself only ever spoke of the song in connection with African American women:
The first of these, whom Bonds said she had “in mind” when she composed her song, was Betty Allen – an internationally successful advocate for the music of Bonds and that of other Black composers as well as that of canonical and modern white Euro-American ones ranging from Handel to Virgil Thompson and Leonard Bernstein. Allen was sought after by the leading conductors of the 1950s and 1960s (among them Bernstein and Eugene Ormandy); she sang the world premiere of Julia Perry’s Stabat Mater in December 1958. Langston Hughes’s friend and assistant Raoul Abdul, a baritone and critic, described her as having “a voice with the richness and vibrancy of a fine cello.” It’s easy to imagine such a voice carrying that beautiful, bluesy melody of the song's opening and soaring to its full operatic power for Bonds’s gloriously Black-self-affirming conclusion.
Betty Allen The following year, proposing that Hughes incorporate the song into future productions of Shakespeare in Harlem “as a reprise,” Bonds proposed Alma Lillie Hubbard, the African American actress and soprano gospel singer who also performed as Serena in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and worked closely with Bonds’s friend and collaborator Warren Coleman. She was known for her performances with The Ink Spots and songs such as “Ain’t No Hidin’ Place Down There” and “The Old Ark Is A’Movin,” and would have roles in several television shows and movies in the 1960s.
Alma Lillie Hubbard Finally, in its latemost incarnation Margaret Bonds’s “Note on Commercial Theater” was dedicated to Georgia Davis [Powers[1]]. Davis was not a singer by profession, but an educator and a a politician – an activist who became the first Black woman senator in Kentucky and whose twenty-one-year term in the Kentucky Senate (1967-88) included influential advocacy for Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. She was featured in a national photographic exhibit titled Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1989.
The point? Margaret Bonds was a strong African American woman proud of her heritage, determined to advocate for Black people through the arts and education, deeply opposed to white cultural exploitations of Black identities for profit, and fully aware of the blues’ power and beauty in voicing the lived experiences specifically of Black women (think of Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald . . .). And the only three individuals (other than Hughes) with whom she ever associated her song were just such women. Yet in modern memory no women have sung this visionary denunciation of white cultural appropriation and affirmation of the “Black and beautiful” woman's self whose strength and vision gave rise to her song.
And therein lies the challenge: in this Women’s History Month, now that Bonds’s Note on Commercial Theater is finally available in print, I hope that some of the extraordinary Black women singers active today will consider learning and performing this manifesto. Then, finally, modern listeners will hear what it meant to Margaret Bonds to proclaim those ringing final words of the poem's final nine lines:
Thanks for reading!
[1] Georgia Davis, born Georgia Montgomery, married in Norman F. Davis in 1943 and used his surname until they divorced in 1968. She remarried and took the surname of her second husband, James L. Powers, in 1973. This was the name by which she is usually identified today.
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