Early 20th Century Black Chicago poet Fenton Johnson's dream poem references Virgil's "The Aeneid." I've turned it into a song as part of my month-long celebration of this lesser-known Midwestern poet who preceded the Harlem Renaissance. 

That's what the Parlando Project does: it takes other peoples words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in various styles. You can find over 700 such combinations at our archives and blog located at frankhudson.org

In 1906, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first Afro-American poet to receive substantial notice, died, only 33 years old. Only a few years later in 1913, a 24 year old Black poet from Chicago, Fenton Johnson, publishes his first poetry collection which in which he pays tribute to Dunbar as he tries to pick up the standard from the fallen Dunbar.

I've made Johnson's poem into a song, and as this Black History Month continues I plan to perform more of Johnson's work and tell something of his career as part of the Parlando Project where we combine words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in various styles. You can find more than 700 examples of that at our archives and blog located at frankhudson.org

American poet Robert Frost assiduously read the book of nature even when the pages were blank. Here's a beautiful short poem that looks out on a wintery night and sees a blank whiteness. I've made the poem into a song accompanied by acoustic guitar.

The Parlando Project takes words, usually other people's words, usually literary page poetry, and combines them original music in various styles. You can find over 700 examples of this at our archives and blog located at frankhudson.org

At least on the face of it, this short Emily Dickinson poem asks for a lifetime of experience all at once, all its grief and joy. As I understood it while creating this performance with original music, she weighs grief and joy as Taoist components.

My music today for this has a touch of a slowcore approach. but I was also thinking of John Lee Hooker, and mic'ed up my foot-stomps for percussion in the electric guitar and voice recording that mimics that combination on Hooker's earliest Blues sides.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in different styles. You can hear over 700 other examples at our blog and archives at frankhudson.org

Goethe's short lyric poem in German wanders into this short folksong arrangement via an English translation by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that I slightly modified for this song performance with my music for 12-string guitar, bass, and piano.

Here's song version of a Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem. Dunbar is often reckoned the first successful Afro-American poet, and this poem, now song, shows how Dunbar wrote both of the Afro-American experience and universal themes within his poetry.

This is a winter sonnet I wrote portraying my thoughts of the mortal illness of another poet Robert Okaji while I, an old man, am bike riding though some winter crows. For the first Parlando piece of this year, I declaimed this with a rock band behind my reading. 

For more than 700 other examples of various words (usually someone else's', usually literary poetry) combined in various ways with original music in several styles, visit our blog and archives at frankhudson.org.