“Sun Song” was published in Langston Hughes’s second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927). About the collection, biographer and critic Arnold Rampersad writes in his essay “Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew,” published in Callaloo, No. 26 (Winter 1986), “[H]e had responded emotionally, as he would assert, to the deep, piercing sadness of the music; later, no doubt, he began to marvel at its curious, accompanying impulse toward laughter. But how was he to effect a link between his learned standards of formal poetry and songs created by the artist among the masses? This question masquerades as one simply of technique; however, it concerns not only the realities of political power—the social powerlessness of blacks translated into the declassification of their art—but the ability of the individual to attain a sufficiently deep identification with his people and their modes of utterance so that, on an individual initiative, he is able to affect a dignified fusion of learned poetic values with those of the despised masses.”