James Weldon Johnson
Quick answer: How James Weldon Johnson turned sermon cadence into poetry in God's Trombones. A craft guide to his rolling free verse, anaphora and folk grandeur.
Some poets find their form early; James Weldon Johnson found his at fifty-six, and it changed American poetry. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, Johnson was by turns school principal, lawyer, Broadway lyricist, US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and executive secretary of the NAACP. In 1900 he wrote the words of 'Lift Every Voice and Sing', set by his brother Rosamond, which generations have called the Black national anthem.
His landmark came in 1927 with God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, which caught the thunder of the old Black folk preacher in long free-verse lines, without dialect spelling. The book solved a technical problem that still faces every poet working from an oral tradition: how to honour a spoken music on the silent page.
Statesman of letters
Johnson's importance is double: his own poems, and his editing. The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), with its combative preface, argued that Black poets needed a form larger than the dialect conventions inherited from minstrelsy, which he said offered only two full stops, humour and pathos.
God's Trombones answered his own challenge. Listening to preachers whose instrument, he said, was not a flute but a trombone, he built verse sermons on the Creation, the Prodigal Son, Judgment Day and more, keeping the grammar standard and the cadence entirely of the pulpit. He died in 1938; his autobiography Along This Way remains a classic.
Signature moves
The craft of God's Trombones can be unpacked move by move.
What you can learn from him
Transcribe a voice you love, a grandparent, a market seller, a preacher, an auctioneer, capturing rhythm through line breaks and repetition while keeping the spelling standard. You will find, as Johnson did, that cadence is portable and caricature is not.
Practise wave-form anaphora: write a passage where a repeated opening phrase returns five times, each return slightly longer or shorter, and read it aloud to feel the tide. Then attempt his scale-jump, describing something immense through the most domestic comparison your childhood offers.
Where to start reading
Begin with 'The Creation', first published in 1920 and the best-known sermon, then the whole of God's Trombones (1927). Read 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' aloud for its hymn architecture, and Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917) for the earlier formal work. His novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man deepens everything the poems imply.
What poets can take from this
- Capture spoken music with line breaks and repetition, never phonetic spelling.
- Build anaphora in waves, varying each return's length.
- Describe the cosmic through the domestic and the domestic through the cosmic.
- Frame a poem as a performance by a speaker from your tradition.
- Read drafts aloud as oratory; mark where a congregation would respond.
Try it yourself
Write a verse sermon in the voice of someone from your community who could hold a room, on a subject they would never actually preach: traffic, homework, the sea. Keep the spelling standard and let rhythm do all the impersonation.
Questions
What is God's Trombones?
A 1927 collection by James Weldon Johnson recreating seven Black folk sermons in free verse, including 'The Creation' and 'Go Down Death'. It is a landmark in rendering oral tradition as literary poetry.
Did James Weldon Johnson write 'Lift Every Voice and Sing'?
Yes, he wrote the lyrics in 1900 for a Lincoln's birthday celebration in Jacksonville; his brother John Rosamond Johnson composed the music. The NAACP later promoted it widely.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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