It is frequently pointed out by critics that oral tradition is an integral part of African-American literature. Not surprisingly, being a part of this tradition, Black music – spirituals, shouts, jubilees, gospel songs, field cries, blues, jazz, etc. – has found its way into poems of so many African-American authors. While the varieties of African-American music are many, few other genres had impact on black literary history as significant as that of blues (Ford). Many of the poems written by Langston Hughes – the author often considered to be the founder of blues poetry (Pounce, 507) – exemplify the greatest qualities of blues as it merges on paper with traditional poetic techniques (Rampersad, 985). One of his earlier blues poems, “The Weary Blues,” in particular, serves as a great illustration of how much influence this musical genre had on the Black poetry.
Blues – music that “describes the daily experience of human oppression, while also maintaining a breath of hope” (Banes) – inspired many black writers beginning from 1920. Despite being frequently imagined as the muse of African-American poetry, blues stanza, however, was rarely employed by poets as a literary form. This had to do with the fact that, while having many different shapes, most of the classic blues songs follow a pattern, in which the first two lines are repeated and all three lines rhyme. Therefore, in written form, the poems employing the blues stanza could be seen by some as too repetitive or monotone (Ford). This is why, in order to add more variety and interest to their verses, many poets for whom blues was an inspiration combined and modified the shape of its stanza while preserving themes of the genre (Banes).
“The Weary Blues” is a great illustration of how the mood of blues can be carried through a poem in a way that does not diminish its stylistic complexity and interest. This poem is interesting for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it combines two voices – that of a narrator and that of a performer. Read independently, the words of the narrator and the words of the black singer could make up two separate poems that differ not only in their main character but also in their moods and connection to blues. While the body of the poem, where the voice of the main character narrates about an encounter with a black singer at a bar, seems to have very little to do with blues stylistically, the words of the singer, which are marked by the indented lines, most certainly possess many of the characteristics of this genre:
I heard a Negro play.
He did a lazy sway . . . .
He did a lazy sway . . . .
O Blues!
Sweet Blues!
O Blues!
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died." (Langston, 977)
As one can see, this excerpt follows the pattern of a traditional blues stanza – one line is repeated twice, although sometimes with a little modification, and all three lines rhyme: “I heard a Negro play. / He did a lazy sway. . . . / He did a lazy sway . . . .” (Langston, 3-7). Throughout this part of the poem, Hughes employs the technique used by many African-American poets, who often embellished rather simple blues stanza by providing alternate phrasing of the repeated line (Ford). The author, however, goes a step beyond that and, in addition to alternating the phrasing – “Ain’t got nobody in all this world. / Ain’t got nobody but ma self.” (Langston, 19-22) – shifts the order of the lines in the tercet – “O Blues! / Sweet Blues! / O Blues!” (Langston, 11-16). These seemingly minor changes help to create a more interesting verse while preserving the spirit of a traditional blues song.
In addition to somewhat following the traditional blues stanza, Hughes makes sure that emotions of the singer are in line with the spirit of blues. In the performer’s rather simple song one can clearly hear the notes of melancholy and sadness that are the integral part of blues songs. This melancholy is emphasized by the poem’s rather slow rhythm. Another peculiarity of the poem lies in the presence of two voices that are responsible for a little confusion as to which “I” belongs to which speaker. This creates an interesting effect: “[Through] his imaginative involvement the speaker has been transformed, he has become a blues singer himself” (Ponce, 519). Finally, “The Weary Blues” has “the interaction or call-and-response” that makes “the reader feel [as] an active participant in the ‘concert’ provided by the poet as musician, as performer” (Davidas, 267).
Langston Hughes was the first African-American poet to extensively use blues in his work. He saw the music of blues as an integral part of Black culture, as something that could be understood and appreciated by common people, something that made him, person of a different social standing, closer to the working class and his poetry more authentic. While blues inspired poems of Hughes are many, “The Weary Blues” occupies a special place among them because, in addition to being one of his first poems of this genre, it is the first work in American poetry to combine black and white rhythms and forms: “In the process [of writing it], Hughes had taken an indigenous African American art form. . . .and preserved its authenticity even as he formally enshrined it in the midst of a poem in traditional European form” (Rampersad, 985). This, among other things, helped Hughes to set his poem apart and to win, in 1925, the first prize for poetry in a literary contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine.
Works Cited
Banes, Ruth A. "Relentlessly writing the weary song: Blues legacies in literature." Canadian Review of American Studies 21.1 (1990): n.pag. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2009.
Davidas, Lionel "'I, Too, Sing America': Jazz and Blues Techniques and Effects in Some of Langston Hughes's Selected Poems."Dialectical Anthropology 26.3/4 (2001): 267-272. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2009.
Ford, Karen J. "These old writing paper blues: The blues stanza and literary poetry." College Literature 24.3 (1997): n.pag. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2009.
Hughes, Langston. “The Weary Blues.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 11th ed. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Longman, 2010. 977. Print.
Ponce, Martin Joseph "Langston Hughes's Queer Blues." Modern Language Quarterly 66.4 (2005): 505-537. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 16 Nov. 2009.
Rampersad, Arnold. “Hughes as an Experimentalist.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 11th ed. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Longman, 2010. 985-986. Print.
