FTP identify this collection named for the instrument that its author associated with his own preacher, a work subtitled "Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" by James Weldon Johnson.
One of its few named characters is Caroline, who is told to embrace death "as a welcome friend," while another figure, who is described among the playing "brass bands," is "never lonesome in Babylon."  Originally accompanied by Aaron Douglass' drawings, its preface implores the poet to follow the footsteps of John Millington Synge and create an authentic literature informed "by spirits from within" his own culture.  It features anthropormorphic descriptions of a supreme being who is "stepping out on space" and who creates man from a riverbed "like a mammy bending over her baby." Compiled over the course of ten years, it was finished during its author's time as field secretary of the NAACP and its most famous sections include "The Judgment Day," "The Creation," and "Let My People Go."  FTP identify this collection named for the instrument that its author associated with his own preacher, a work subtitled "Seven Negro Sermons in Verse" by James Weldon Johnson.
One of its few named characters is Caroline, who is told to embrace death "as a welcome friend," while another figure, who is described among the playing "brass bands," is "never lonesome in Babylon."  
God's Trombones