Soul Talk—Langston Hughes and Nina Simone’s Friendship: A Conversation with Jason Miller

ABSTRACT This interview presents Jason Miller’s research on the friendship between Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, who was known as the High Priestess of Soul. As a Hughes scholar, Miller combines his knowledge of Hughes with painstaking biographical research on Simone. In this way, he demonstrates how Hughes is connected to soul. Miller traces their friendship to Simone’s active participation in a local chapter of the NAACP when she was a high school student. Then he explains how the two artists later met, in a real sense, after Simone became a professional artist. Most important, Miller discusses the nature of their friendship, which led to their momentous collaboration on Hughes’s poem “The Backlash Blues” that Simone transformed into her own song, as evident in Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s film Summer of Soul.