Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes

Leyla McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs is a celebration of the complexity of Black culture and identity, and a tribute to the legacy of poet and thinker Langston Hughes. A songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, McCalla sets Hughes’ poems to her own spare yet profound compositions. She juxtaposes these with arrangements of folk songs from Haiti, the first independent Black nation and the homeland of her parents, tapping into the nuances of Black experience. McCalla’s music elegantly weaves Haitian influences together with American folk music, just as Hughes incorporated Black vernacular into his remarkable poetry, and the way the Haitian Kreyòl is a beacon for the survival of African identity through the brutal legacy of colonialism. This is music of reclamation, imbued with a quiet power that grapples with the immense weight of history.

Vari-Colored Songs had a limited release in 2013, with the New York Times proclaiming that “[McCalla’s] magnificently transparent music holds tidings of family, memory, solitude and the inexorability of time: weighty thoughts handled with the lightest touch imaginable.” The recording is being brought to a wider audience by Smithsonian Folkways at a time when the history McCalla explores is more relevant than ever. As she states in the album’s liner notes, “The wisdom and truth that Langston Hughes continues to provide us through his prolific output inspires us to celebrate the assumedly mundane and stigmatized parts of our society. The future has always been uncertain, and it has always been up to us to push for the changes that we want to see in the world.”

Track Listing

101	Heart of Gold	Leyla McCalla	02:59
102	When I Can See the Valley	Leyla McCalla	02:10
103	Mèsi Bondye	Leyla McCalla	02:26
104	Girl	Leyla McCalla	02:51
105	Kamèn sa w fè?	Leyla McCalla	02:21
106	Too Blue	Leyla McCalla	02:28
107	Manman Mwen	Leyla McCalla	03:19
108	Song for a Dark Girl	Leyla McCalla	02:49
109	As I Grew Older / Dreamer	Leyla McCalla	03:50
110	Love Again Blues	Leyla McCalla	02:39
111	Rose Marie	Leyla McCalla	02:58
112	Latibonit	Leyla McCalla	03:49
113	Search	Leyla McCalla	03:20
114	Lonely House	Leyla McCalla	03:27
115	Changing Tide	Leyla McCalla	03:03