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Host Gatley Stone interviews some of NC State’s most distinguished professors to learn about their research and how they made it to where they are today. This series is made possible thanks to NC State's student radio station, WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.
Gatley Stone 0:01
Welcome back everyone. Today, we are having the pleasure of interviewing Dr Jason Miller. He is an English professor and a distinguished alumni professor, along with many, many other awards. And I am very fascinated with his research and also his research process, and he has produced some fantastic discoveries on major 20th century literary figures, and has specifically written a biography on Langston Hughes and a book on how Langston Hughes influenced Dr King's I Have a Dream speech. So welcome the first question, we just start with some background. What is your job title?
Jason Miller 0:48
So I'm a professor of English, and that means I'm kind of interested in literary theory, research, teaching, and I do have a really complicated title, Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate professor. So it's a mouthful. Supposedly, that means that the engagements I have with students are very productive for both of us.
Gatley Stone 1:10
okay, how long have you been teaching at NC State?
Jason Miller 1:13
I have been fortunate enough to be here for 19 years. And even better, this is the only institution I've known after finishing up my graduate work, so it's been really nice, and I feel very, very fortunate and humbled to be at such a distinguished institution like ours.
Gatley Stone 1:31
Okay, now with some background, when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? When
Jason Miller 1:36
I was a child, that was easy. My whole family is full of athletes, so both my mom and dad were college athletes. My dad had to choose between a college scholarship to play football or basketball. He chose basketball, and my mom was a really elite diver. And so I grew up in a world of being very active. And so basketball was my first love. And so at a very young age, I imagined playing basketball and that that took me into college, but no further than that.
Gatley Stone 2:05
So did you play college basketball? I
Jason Miller 2:07
did, I played college basketball at a relatively low level, but I did have coach that played the NBA for four years. He was amazing engagement, telling stories about people and and so I learned a lot just from from him. That's cool.
Gatley Stone 2:25
So were you always set on going to college, or did you consider alternatives
Jason Miller 2:30
when I was young it probably says a lot about the privilege I'd enjoyed. I just assumed you went to college, no brothers or sisters, both my parents were educated at the college level, and so for me, it was always just which school, and that's a very fortunate place to be, and I've come to learn, but at the time, it was just a given,
Gatley Stone 2:52
yeah. So how did you end up choosing your major?
Jason Miller 2:58
I chose my major in a very unique way. I was in the middle of being very, very active, and it came to be the sophomore year of college, and you had to declare a major. I started looking around me, and I saw a number of people, and I finally talked to one particular English professor, and I just met her during her office hours. I said, Do you enjoy what you do? And she says, I really do, interacting with students, bringing literature to people's minds is a really wonderful thing. And so I decided to be an English Education major. And so my only vision as an undergraduate college student was to teach high school. And so I actually did that for five years before I came into this world, I taught freshman and sophomore English and so all the classics, Ernest, Hemingway, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet, all those particular things. And so it really started with seeing someone that was passionate, and then had enough time to visit with me and talk through how much she valued that decision she made.
Gatley Stone 4:04
So you were teaching for five years. How did you end up deciding to go back and get your Master's and PhD? So it's a strange
Jason Miller 4:12
process. Back in the mid 90s, the only way you could accelerate and be relicensed was to continue your own education. So I was
Gatley Stone 4:22
Relicensed as what?
Jason Miller 4:23
as a teacher, really? So yeah, a long time ago, you actually had to show that you were continuing to learn to be to relicensed as a teacher. So I was in a very rural area, and so I couldn't do that little by little. I had to do it all at once. Nothing was offered during the summers. And so I decided that I wanted to teach for my entire life. And so I went back and I was going to finish up my master I was going to start and finish my master's degree. It was a very funny story there. I think you'll really actually enjoy. So I graduated from college five years earlier, five years now, I'm asking to get my master's degree when I. Go to a registrar's office back in the day, you had to walk there in person. I said, I need all my transcripts sent so I can apply. She said, Well, according to our records, you have never even graduated from college. I said you've got to be kidding, she said, Well, your final semester was not even sent over. And so I often tell students how strange that is to realize that I guess the person I actually was when I interviewed for jobs was whatever I gleaned from my courses, not an actual piece of paper. And so that's something to kind of keep in mind as you go forward. Once I started working on that master's degree and they got the transcripts sent over in English, you have the unusual privilege, we actually get to teach college courses. Maybe you and some of your peers have experienced this reason for while you're, while you're in college, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you're, you know, you're working on your degree and you get to teach classes. And I'm about two weeks into my first class, I'm like, I enjoy teaching college even more than high school. How can I do that? So that's where things turned I
Gatley Stone 5:59
think that's really fantastic how such an accomplished researcher sort of stumbled upon a PhD and research just by the virtue that you had to renew your license. So you really didn't have any intent. But it's crazy how things work out like that. You are
Jason Miller 6:19
very perceptive. That's exactly the story. I had no intention of doing research, writing, being at a big university. In fact, even when I got further along in the PhD, my only goal was to be at a small liberal arts school where I could actually just teach all the time, because that was my driving focus. I really liked being in the classroom, and so I just became, as you said so well, kind of an accidental scholar, and it's really remarkable, when you kind of think about your whole life, many people will set their trajectory and follow through, but other things just kind of happen to us as much as we choose it.
Gatley Stone 6:54
So once you were into your PhD, how did you really decide to focus on the area of focus that you wanted to so
Jason Miller 7:07
one really unique thing happened to me. I've been teaching before, and so I taught this poet named Langston Hughes in the classroom, and I play electric guitar, so I used to bring the guitar in and show the blues structure and what's behind it. So I thought I knew Langston Hughes. When I was in graduate school, a very new book had just come out, and it had collected a lot of the poems that we hadn't seen before. And when I started reading these poems, I was like, I've been teaching this guy for a long time, and don't know any of these things. And so I immediately realized that if I didn't know them. There was a ton of other people that didn't as well. So curiosity kind of matched timing, and then was kind of encouraged and underlined by response. When I started talking to people about the kind of things I was uncovering and finding, they were very interested. And so that kind of became the circle of my own misunderstandings being renewed, and then finding out a lot of other people were in the same boat. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 8:04
I think that's one of the things that I find so remarkable about your research the more I learn about it. It's like your research is you know about huge figures like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, and then you somehow discover, like, in in an attic or something that hasn't been gone into for, like, over 30 years, and then you find a speech that is a prerequisite to one of the most famous speeches in American history. And no one has heard no one has discovered it until you rediscovered it. I think that's, that's what makes your research so compelling to me. So after that book came out, is that when you just you decided to start doing serious reasearch research into Langston Hughes.
Jason Miller 8:57
So it's very interesting. I had started doing, kind of the really intense research at the end of graduate school to write the dissertation, and then kind of landing in the world. I'd looked at his poems and had written a book about him, but one day I went over to D.H. Hill Library and I said, you know, some people have always wondered, Langston Hughes wrote all these poems about dreams? Is it possible that Martin Luther King's famous dream has anything to do with them. And so there's like, five shells over. DH Hill, of all these books by Martin Luther King, I said, I'm going to take one day and just kind of look into this. And so I pull the first book off the shelf. It was called the trumpet of conscience. It's a series of speeches Dr King delivered in 1967 and I go to the back and there's no index, so I can't, like, just find Langston Hughes's name in there. Start flipping backwards, and I come to page 76 and on the left, Dr King is saying, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams. Now, deferred dreams is Langston Hughes's most iconic poem, he said, what happens to a dream deferred? does it dry up like A Raisin in the Sun? It fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet, maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? I said to myself, the first book I'm looking at, he's already referencing this. By the end of the day, I'd seen three poems that Dr King had used of Langton Hughes, and by the time I finished the research, there was a total of seven. Why does this happen? It happens because of the way that our disciplines are set up. Engineers talk to engineers. We have people in sociology talking to other sociologists. People in the world of history don't often talk to the people in the world of literature. Historians aren't interested in poetry, and poets aren't often thinking about historical times, and so making that crossover was the beginning of something really, really interesting.
Gatley Stone 10:51
Yeah, I'd like to walk through your research process, because when you when you're researching such a broad topic, like, if you're going to write a biography, there's so many, it's so open ended that I don't even know where you start. Whereas, you know, maybe you can ask a specific question, like, I don't know, did Martin Luther King ever give a speech at Reynolds Coliseum? You could ask that question, and the answer is probably much easier to find. But if you're trying to define a whole period of someone's life, like, how do you personally start? Is it with, like, interviews libraries? Well,
Jason Miller 11:32
it's remarkable because you're right on something here in terms of this idea of asking the right questions. And you do start with these questions about thinking about these relationships and what's happening. Often I start with actual books and then kind of move on to the information. But one thing that's really interesting is I actually chart all these things on unbelievable timelines. And so this is like a butcher paper that has all these relationships between different people. This is on the current project I'm doing with Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, and so what you're trying to do is so crazy, and this is, like, 50 feet long and a foot and a half tall. It's just massive, but it's color coded, yeah. So like, what is one person doing, what's the other person doing, and what's going on historically and old school techniques like this, writing it out by hand, using colors, usually gets you to those exact questions you're thinking of and wondering about. And so what I get to do is I go to traditional archives. And so all Langston Hughes' papers are at Yale University. I spent a number of hours there going through them. Dr King's things are available at Boston University and Atlanta, and a few things out in Stanford. So you go to those places, but then the questions just keep coming, and so it becomes cyclic. Now I'm going to jump ahead. So what became startling is that I realized that archives are limited in what they contain because of the people that set them up years ago. So when I started talking to the general public, I started realizing that some of the most important information was in people's houses, attics, basements, or hearts and minds. And so that is when my research personally changed, when I realized that history doesn't just live in people's books and in archives and libraries, it lives in people's hearts and in their minds, and that's something that said, I need to be going in different directions and going to different places.
Gatley Stone 13:32
Could you so your discovery of the recording of Dr King's original I Have a Dream speech was, you've been received a lot of awards for that, and also, like you have written a lot about that, could you actually describe how you ended up finding it
Jason Miller 13:51
absolutely so I had just finished a full draft of this book about everything between Langston Hughes and Dr. King, I'd been to all these libraries, all these archives, and I had five kind of burning questions that I need to follow up on, and one of them was that somebody had told me, even after seven years of research, okay, that Dr King had spoken in Rocky Mount. I said, I've been through all these libraries, I've been putting together the timeline. There's no reference to this thing, what in the world happened? So I went down and I said, I got to figure this out, because I'm traveling all around the country, and this is less than an hour away from me. So I went down to the State Archives, which is downtown on Jones Street, and they have a number of files there when they kind of mark historical moments. And so to get a historical marker up, you actually have to have some research into it that this person is important or happening. So there was a historical marker in Rocky Mount. I said, How did they document this? Right? How did they find and I'm flipping through just this old Manila file. I mean, it's old paperwork, you know, especially with historians. And there was a reference to the fact that there was a transcript of Dr King's Speech. Now, in order to write out a transcript, you have to be hearing a recording of it. And so in three seconds, I said, Where is this recording? Who was able to type this thing up? And so it took me about six weeks of inquiring all across the state, in all different places. Do you know of anything? Do you have any of these things? And lo and behold, the actual reel to reel audio tape, seven inches round was on a cracked frame. It was frayed at the end, and it was in a box that was rusted, showed up mysteriously at a local library right in the city of Rocky Mountain, and had never even been played in the library. They had no idea what was on it, but I was encouraged, because when I looked at the box, it said, Martin Luther King, Jr, speech, November 27 1962 and the corner said, get this, please do not erase. that's exactly what my heart felt. And so what I had to do from there is I had to do a ton of research on 1.4 millimeter acetate. I'm just going to throw that in a machine and see if it plays. So these little tapes literally look like when the FBI is interrogating somebody, they're spinning back and forth And so finally, I found a person I could trust. And I said, why can this thing, if it is what it is, be trusted? And they said, Well, this guy wrote the book for the Library of Congress on how to digitize materials. Like, okay, that is the guy. So I the bag is actually sitting right to your right. I put the tape in the box and in that bag, and then I drove to Philadelphia, that's where this guy's at Philadelphia, and that got set up because I gave him a call. I said, George, I have this tape. I was wondering if you could digitize it for me. He said, Oh yeah, put that in the mail. These usually take three to four weeks. I said, No, you don't understand, if this is what we think it is it's the first time Martin Luther King ever said I Have A Dream. He said, Can you come Sunday? And now this is a guy that's recorded the famous recordings of Robert Johnson. He's digitized some of the most important things in history, and he was fascinated, so he met with me personally. We're in this room that's 18 inch wide walls, so no sound can come in. And he puts the tape in, and he runs it through. And I always thought there was like a top and a bottom, but really, you know, you flip the tape like A and B side, but really the the tape itself has a top and a bottom of the actual tape. And so he took the forwards and backwards all in one pass, the tape only had to go through once. And all of a sudden, he makes these adjustments, and we hear, I have a dream, and it was really stunning. And the final part that's really fascinating to folks is because we live in this digital world where everything just kind of transfers is, he didn't just take the tape and make a digital version of it. It was kind of CSI like. He had to actually slow down places and adjust volumes, because some of the tape was actually wrinkled and folded over. And so if he didn't do those, what we call restoring the tape, then the transcript would still be full of question marks and guess words, but he got every word out, and we could hear that particular way. And so that was a really startling moment of then bringing that first to the world, and then for the next six years, bringing it back to the community, so the community of Rocky Mountain North Carolina could realize what an important role they played in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and so a lot of collaboration that ensued in terms of restaging the speech, then doing a performance, and kind of educating the general public, and that was really rewarding.
Gatley Stone 18:24
Yeah, that's something that I was thinking about. How when you stumble upon such an incredible discovery, how does that moment stack up to, like, other moments in your life? Yeah, it's
Jason Miller 18:38
really hard to compare, because often, when something happens, you know what it is, but that moment was just the possibility that it could be, still. there's one way to measure it. When I drove with the tape immediately, I couldn't even focus on how to get back to Raleigh. I was so disoriented, I missed a couple exits, and I had to just stop. So my heart must have been racing. And so the potential likelihood kind of overlapped in those particular ways. It's really stunning. And so it's a series of moments. It's in moments of the possibility. It's the thrill of sharing it, and then it's, of course, when it's audio, just the fascination of hearing it and studying it and then really understanding the big thing that we haven't talked about was why it was so important was I had Martin Luther King using a Langston Hughes poem called I dream a world in 1956 I had him using That poem again in the march on Washington, where he says, I have a dream. But I couldn't see how they were linked, so I had the bookends, and that actual tape had to find me, because it's the place where he revised the 1956 speech into, I have a dream. So when Langston Hughes says, I dream a world where man no other man will scorn, where love will bless the earth and peace its paths adorn. I Dream A world where all will know sweet freedom's way, where greed no longer saps the soul, nor avarice blights a day. A world I dream I have a dream, a world I dream where black or white, whatever race should be, will share the bounds of the earth, and every man is free. That was the poem. Dr King was rewriting his own language in Rocky Mount, and then he took it out of that speech and used it separately. And so it was just a crescendo. I've never done much surfing, but I imagine it's like getting the best way every single time out.
Gatley Stone 20:35
Yeah, I think, yeah, that's another thing. It's like, I Well, I've grown up through the public school system, you know, reading and listening to Dr King's speech, and I I've always been awed by his how good he is at giving speeches and how like eloquent he is. And it's so interesting to know that he was heavily inspired by Langston Hughes and like that. Connect, that connection of such an important figure is like not discussed practically at all, which makes it makes, makes him so much more of a dynamic, dynamic character. You know, that's a
Jason Miller 21:13
beautiful way to express that thought. That's really intuitive. And it turns out that this just keeps going on earlier and earlier than we ever realized, in terms of Dr King absorbing things. And so we can think of him as kind of listening to the preachers that's been well documented. We can imagine him sometimes engaging with other preachers, like his own father, but to think that he was really fascinated with poetry, and then that made its way there. You know, poetry is where memory breathes, and so it's the reason those things you were listening to are memorable. It's not just that he said them over and over again. It's a dream of a better world. It's a dream of something stronger in those particular ways. And the fact that, you know, those can come across time and create a vision for things that kind of simultaneously contain echoes of other things, right? Some people hear, well, that's dream. That's like the American dream. I get that. And some people that are very kind of religious and understand kind of Old Testament things, Oh, I get like a dream that maybe a prophet would have, and then you get the idea of it just literally being a poetic metaphor. And what Dr King found was he found the metaphor that really bound all three of those threads into one dynamic chord, and so he could reach every possible audience. Maybe a black church member hears one thing. Maybe somebody that's from a socioeconomic class and is thinking of what their American dream would be would hear one thing, and then the people who knew literature captured the idea of the metaphor itself. And that kind of range is dynamic, and that's why it he's perhaps you know the most important orator of the 20th century, yeah,
Gatley Stone 23:05
I think, you know, thinking back on it, I think it's kind of obvious that he's so inspired by poetry, because he uses so many great literary devices that really stick with you. So back on some more research processes I saw that for one of your projects, your student had interviewed a 90 year old woman that was high school classmates with Nina Simone and had attended a Langston Hughes performance at her high school in 1949 along with Nina Simone and your student interviewed her and your student, she mentioned something pretty deep that I've been thinking about is she says that there's an urgency to learning about this era of history, because you know that generation is getting smaller and smaller. Well, do you feel that pressure to, like, get as much knowledge down and, you know, immortalized as quickly as possible?
Jason Miller 24:07
That's really profound. And Lauren Mackenzie's project of talking to Mary Burnett alive and well at age 90, at the particular time, remembering being a roommate of Nina Simone was so incredible because, as you said, all those details are out there in people's minds and memories, but once their minds and memories leave us, then they're gone in this particular way. What you said is triply important when it comes to documenting black history, all history itself can get lost and misplaced, but when you look at the history of the 20th century, you see a lot of things undervalued and other things overvalued. And so black experiences in North Carolina in the 1940s are incredibly rare, and probably four or five times more important than we can imagine and so getting those stories is absolutely a responsibility and a privilege and what you're really trying to do is you're really trying to be a bridge. There's a person out there with expertise, and there's whole groups of people with interest. How can I bring those two folks together? And so I don't mean to intentionally activate the engineering notion of a bridge, but these experts that have this knowledge, they really need to literally have their voices heard. And Lauren's project of interviewing Mary is the perfect example of that, capturing these particular things that would have been lost any other way and it really is an incredible value, because at the very end of all this, this is startling, takes a while to kind of grow up to, a researcher can actually uncover things about the subject that they didn't know to be true themselves. And it's really startling when you're going through these things. and well, of course, they lived it. well there were things happening that they didn't understand and wouldn't understand for years afterwards and so, but that is a great way to think of it, the responsibility. And it really kind of drives, drives you, especially when it's linked with curiosity.
Gatley Stone 26:20
How did you find the undeveloped photos of ML Martin Luther King at the Reynolds Coliseum when he gave his speech? So because
Jason Miller 26:29
I'd done the work on I Have a Dream speech. When the university was redoing Reynolds Coliseum, they heard a rumor that maybe Dr King had actually spoke there. And they're like, We don't have anything about this. We talked to people. Can you tell us about it? And I went back again, and there's no reference into it, and all these books and these other places you could look to. And so I said, Well, I'll try to find out. So the first place I went, he talked about where knowledge is gathered is I went to Dr King's FBI file. Wow. And so, because he was under that kind of FBI surveillance, they tracked his every move and where he was going. And I said, Okay, he was actually here. And then I talked to a lot of people in the area that like, knew things about other things. And so there was a incredible man named Tim peeler, he's still around at the University, who wrote a book about Reynolds Coliseum. He said, You know, when I was writing the book about all the basketball events and things that have happened, I do remember, I think, possibly seeing a couple images down at the State Archives. So I go down to the State Archives again, and I say, you know, do you have any anything? they said, well, we do have something. And talk about a blast from the past. They hand me an envelope filled with undeveloped photograph negatives all wrapped in a rubber band. Now, if you don't know what photograph negatives are, right, they're these long strips of things that then had to be turned into the actual picture. These negatives had never even been developed. So I've got this gigantic magnifying glass. It's like the size of a softball, flat on one end, and I'm running it over, these things on this table, like I can't believe what I'm seeing, what's happening here. So we got those developed, and then we started sharing them with people and talking about the larger context of Dr King's visit to Reynolds Coliseum, July 31 1966 what, again, became fascinating to see this link is when we started sharing that with people. More and more people came forward with what they knew, what they remembered. And so it becomes kind of this example of cyclicity, where the one thing happens and it builds on another, and it just becomes this big cycle of information where you're helping people understand how important things they are and what they have and possess, and then you're also kind of framing things for people who didn't even know they existed is particularly hard. So that's what kind of transpired there. We got really fortunate, because the photographs were taken by the news and observer staff. They're incredibly high quality, and so the images that you can see are just immaculate in detail, and they of course, tell an incredibly harrowing story of how much intimidation went against Dr King on that particular day by citizens from around the state. But they also tell the story of Dr King persisting against that. And now what they're doing is they're telling the story of NC State embracing Dr King's visit and trying to really understand how important that was, and that acknowledgement means a lot to different people on campus, in terms of what gets represented, what gets remembered. Didn't
Gatley Stone 29:35
you bring in a group of was was it a group of people that had maybe attended
Jason Miller 29:42
the Yeah, it was remarkable. And so I did a lot of interviews of people that attended. I did a lot of interviews with people who had been there that day. And then slowly and surely, I did one particular talk for our libraries, and it's been viewed now over 10,000 Times Online, because so many people were like, I think my dad was there. My mom was there, this particular way. And so the really interesting next breakthrough kind of back to the image of the cycle. So we got wheels and bridges for engineering folks. It was when I started showing those photographs. One person named Marshall Wyatt said, I believe my dad took Super Eight film footage that day. And they said, Would you be interested? And of course, I got that message right here. And I said, Yes, I would. And so what his father had done is he had this big camera that had these reels of film on it, moving film, no sound and the moving film would take about 50 feet of film just to do two and a half minutes. That's how difficult things were back then. But his dad went out took pictures of KKK March that happened right down Hillsborough Street to defy Dr King's visit, and he took photos of a counter protest that was taking place. And then lo and behold, even though I've been searching for five years for any real, visible evidence of Dr King speaking in Reynolds coliseum he went inside and Marshall Wyatt's father, Edgar Wyatt, went inside and he aimed his Super Eight film right at the television. Because, lo and behold, Dr King's speech was televised across public television all across the state. Wow. And so we got this 19 seconds of uninterrupted view of Dr King from three different camera angles, and then we're really able to kind of recreate folks what the day was like.
Gatley Stone 31:38
Yeah, I think that is something that has to be really meaningful about your work. Is like, you know, the, like, the black community that was attending and like a part of that movement, they you're able to, like, really put it in the history books, sort of in a celebration for them. I think that's really meaningful. How did you become interested in Nina Simone?
Jason Miller 32:07
So really fascinating story. I had just finished a biography on poet Langton Hughes, and it was the first new biography on him in about 35 years covered his whole life, detailed it all, another one of these huge timelines. And I was fortunate enough to launch the book in Washington, DC. There's a place there called Busboys and Poets, where they really kind of embraced Langston Hughes' time there, where he was a busboy in Washington, DC. So they named the entire place after him, it's a bookstore, there's, like seven of them in the DC area. So we launched the book there, and I was like, I told a local story about Langston Hughes' being in Washington DC, people seemed to've liked it. So when I came back to Raleigh. I was at Quail Ridge books. I said, Oh, I'll tell a little local story here. See, people like to make that connection. Here's somebody really famous. What did they do in our state? So I'm standing in front of this group of people. I said, you know, Langston Hughes had an incredible reach, and it even ties to North Carolina. I see a lot of people leaning forward like, okay, North Carolina, tell us the story. In fact, a really important musician approached Langston Hughes and said, you know, would you mind this thing you wrote appearing as kind of a an important liner notes on my next album, so the back would kind of have your endorsement. And I told the group, I said, Langston Hughes said, why, Yes, Nina, I'd be delighted to and the whole crowd, they just gasp like no, not Nina Simone, not even- she's ours. She's amazing. And there was literally a collective breath that just stunned me. And so at that moment, I said, Nina Simone is very important to the people of North Carolina. She means a great deal. And I said I had to figure out what the bigger relationship was. So I come back to this office and say, Okay, what if- I just finished a biography on Langston Hughes, I didn't even put Nina Simone's name in there. What have all these other people said? Turns out, in all the other seven biographies before, there's only one substantive sentence devoted to Langston Hughes and Nina Simone. So I went back to start recreating when they met, what they spent time together, how often they've been there. And once again, just like these worlds of history and literature don't often overlap, the worlds of music and literature don't even overlap. And so I became very fascinated in recreating a relationship that I knew nothing about, and then finding out that other people were very interested in. So the most unique element I could say about it that's really unique is that what I've come to find out is that Langston Hughes mentored Nina Simone. She was much younger than he was. He was much like a father figure, and so he was able to really kind of guide her through the entertainment business. And he did two huge things. One, he established her reputation very early in her career by writing a review that went national, that made sure people didn't confuse her with Billie Holiday. Nina Simone had sung the same song that Billie Holiday, did I love you, Porgy, she and so people assume black person. Here's the next Billy Holiday, like people often do with Bob Dylan, here's the next Bob Dylan. And then the second thing he did, which is really startling, is she earned this title, the High Priestess of soul. And Hughes was so interested in the way that artists would market themselves or kind of build a persona, he actually drove her to that title. And so the moniker she's known by the high priestess of soul and the very beginnings of her career owe a great deal to her personal relationship with Langston Hughes and so much more. Yeah,
Gatley Stone 35:41
yeah, that's another thing that's really cool is like, how there can be so much that has been told about Langston Hughes, and then there's he becomes more dynamic when you, like, look more into his relationship with music and musicians. And I think that it's kind of cool because it's like, how you're an English professor, but you're so invested in history, it's like that there's so much to learn in that overlap. Yeah, it's
Jason Miller 36:09
a beautiful way to say,
Gatley Stone 36:12
let's see. I think that's going to close out the research questions, a more background question, what do you like to do in your free time?
Jason Miller 36:24
So I enjoy hiking, and my son lives down in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So a lot of times I get to go down to South America and do some hiking in some really high mountains, like 15,000 to 17,000 feet. So that's an incredible joy of mine, and we get to do that a lot. So being outdoors, hiking is a real, real pleasure. What's
Gatley Stone 36:47
like the biggest unknown that you still want to know the answer to?
Jason Miller 36:54
It's very interesting, because almost anything that really bothers me I've already been pursuing, yeah, but in terms of this current relationship with Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, there are gaps that I wish I could fill. One of them is this notion that Langston Hughes actually attended a very, very important gathering of people in 1964 when Nina Simone presented and performed at the famous Carnegie Hall, it would be fascinating to know exactly what their discussions were like after that moment. And I say that because Langston Hughes got a personal invite to be at the Carnegie Hall performance. Nina Simone performs the first of four songs that Langston Hughes actually suggested. So could you imagine, you know, a conversation, why don't you sing this song? It'll be interesting then all of a sudden you see this world famous person up on stage taking your advice. Yeah, I think it would be quite fascinating to kind of imagine what that would be like as Langston Hughes is, talking to Nina Simone. It's a great question. When
Gatley Stone 38:08
you're not working, how often are you thinking about your research?
Jason Miller 38:11
You know you're really on to something there, because you can't measure these hours with all the people you're talking to in terms of time at the screen or in the office, you are always working on these things. I have a notebook, a series of notebooks, that I carry around all the time because an idea will come to you, and you have to write it down at that particular moment. We have kind of this notion, I think, in our imagination, of people getting the moment when they're sleeping or the shower, it is all the time for most researchers, and you'll find yourself coming back to things just repeatedly, over and over again. And so thinking, questioning, revisiting, being curious, there are things that really no, no bounds. I like to say it this way, my office is the world, and so wherever I am, I can be uncovering or finding out something that's related to what I want to know more about.
Gatley Stone 39:03
So two more questions, as basically, the world becomes digitized and everyone has a phone and everyone's recording everything. Do you have any thoughts, or have you thought about how that is going to change how history gets recorded? Yeah, I
Jason Miller 39:23
really think it will. There's scholars that are far more invested in this than I am, but there's a sense of embodiment that comes through when you can actually hear the voice or with video, see the person move. There's so much communicated there that isn't just on the word that we typed in this particular way, and absolutely, between email messages, text messages, voice messages, all these particular things, things are going to be animated in new ways, and including, I think, important ways that we also have to ensure that we don't lose that metadata. There's something really strange about paper. Paper has a permanence to it, even as fragile as it is, but sometimes when things are only on one phone or one person has access to them in a cloud and password, just as much as they're captured, they could be lost. So a lot of people are also wrestling with this. How do we ensure we capture and preserve what we've certainly recorded? But I think it's an exciting world, and it's made research much more dynamic. And I think it'll continue to really, really invest things. Because, you know, what I see over and over again in the people that I research is, as time goes by, their stories change, and you want the story they have right at the moment immediately afterwards. Yeah, I think that's, you know, kind of communicated in a lot of things that people will record and document, not the story they end up telling. That's the kind of entertaining and broader in that particular way. And but we are in a moment where all those things are becoming more and more available. And I think it's, it's really important, because it's not only documenting it, but I think what you're getting at with your question is it's also making it transferable. So many people that aren't in that space can get to it from around the world. And so it's documented changing, but it's also accessible, and that accessibility is is really remarkable, as long as we can wade through it and get to what we really work. And
Gatley Stone 41:21
just to close out, so if you had to give some advice to a student that's considering either getting a PhD or becoming a professor, what sort of advice do you have for them?
Jason Miller 41:32
People who want to pursue a PhD these days are in really challenging circumstances, depending on what their field is in the humanities. It's very challenging right now to get into programs and kind of land in these kind of positions, if you want to be a professor. However, in a lot of positions that are outside, that are kind of growing or that have funding from Grant relationships, the PhD student that's going to succeed, will be surprised by what skills they actually need. From the outside looking in, you often think, am I intelligent enough? Am I really just booksmart enough? And what you find out over and over again from people who go through these programs and successfully have exciting careers on the outside is it takes as much will and discipline as it does intelligence. And so the commitment levels that a person has, the discipline, the work ethic, even at a PhD, they're every bit as important as just kind of raw genius, and that, a lot of times, is really encouraging to people that are getting started, because when we see people we aspire to be, we forget they're 30, 35, 40 years ahead of us in what they've been experiencing and studying. And so we don't want to equate ourselves with them in terms of what appears to be memory or knowledge or genius, the will, discipline. Those are really, really admirable traits and will lead to really exciting things. And the big thing that I often say to students in just about any field they might be interested in, is if you enjoy the preparation over the performance, you've often picked the right thing, meaning the outcome of what you do might be flawed or need to be improved, but if you like getting ready for it every day, you like going to those classes. You like taking those notes, the preparation of it, being inside of it, that's a great indicator that you're doing exactly what you need to do, and ultimately allowing other people to be your biographers and tell the story of what you invested in them, because even when we go in these moments and earn these degrees, is still the people around us that get to define who we are, and they define that based on how we've engaged with them, and our life is their story to tell.
Gatley Stone 43:57
That was a great, great way to close out. Thank you.
Jason Miller 44:00
Thank you so much for this time. It's been a real pleasure.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai