Cullen collaborates on the musical St. Louis Woman
Poet involved
What happened
In the last year of his life Countee Cullen, working from Tuckahoe and New York, collaborated with Arna Bontemps on the book of St. Louis Woman, a musical drawn from Bontemps’s novel God Sends Sunday, with songs by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Rehearsals were about to begin when Cullen died in January 1946. The show opened after his death at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway and ran 113 performances, introducing Pearl Bailey in the role of Butterfly.
Literary impact
The musical marked Cullen’s final shift from lyric poetry to the stage and to collaboration. Completing the book with Bontemps returned him to a Harlem Renaissance friendship and left a popular-theatre coda to a career begun in prize sonnets.
Source: Wikipedia
