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13. Langston Hughes’s Blues Monica Michlin Of all the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes was the one who recognized the blues as a major art form.1 From his first book of verse, The Weary Blues, which showed his intent to present his poetic voice as a blues voice, to “The Backlash Blues” (1967), Hughes stood by the blues as an expression of what was most vital, most resilient, most dynamic, and most painful at the heart of the African-American experience.2 In this, he distinguished himself from the aesthetics of most writers of the Harlem Renaissance by looking not toward European high culture, but toward contemporary black popular culture as the only basis for truly African-American art. When applied to a literary form, the word “blues” raises a number of questions . How can a poem be a blues? Can Hughes’s blues aesthetic be reduced to the use of song-like patterns and stanzas, poems in deliberately “songtranscript ” form? Or are the vast majority of his poems, written in more standard poetic form and simple standard English, to be read as a “transfusion” of blues into his writing? Does Hughes’s blues aesthetic successfully subvert the notions of high and low art, of oral or primarily written lyrics and literature? And finally, is the be-bop of Montage of a Dream Deferred a rejection of the blues? Or, on the contrary, is it proof that Hughes’s blues aesthetic was dialectical and that it never ceased to find new forms of black song to denounce racial oppression—not in terms of lament, but in terms of struggle—with literary weapons that wished themselves accessible to all? As early as the first line of “I, Too” (1925)—“I, too, sing America”— Hughes’s poetry connects the black poetic voice, committed literature, the 236 American literary tradition, and song. Through the allusion to Whitman—the poet who wished to give a voice to the forbidden voices of America3 —Hughes was pointing to the paradox that the black voice was excluded from America and yet could sing it, too. In his search for the aesthetic that would allow the identification of his poetic voice, and of the working-class voices of black America, Hughes quickly realized that the only artists who were speaking and singing the actual reality of the black masses were the blues singers of his day. Not only could Hughes effect a mise-en-scène of the poet-figure in portraying the blues singer or the jazz musician, but the blues themselves seemed the most contemporary form of black culture that truly committed black poetry could portray. Thus, Hughes initially wrote about the blues; but as he did, he found that the vernacular, the rhythm, the imagery, the bitter-sweetness, the sadness, and the resiliency of the blues themselves could enrich his poetry—that it would not be poetry on the blues, but poetry of the blues, poetry infused with the blues. The first poem Hughes called “blues” was “The Weary Blues” (written in 1923). Before that, Hughes had already taken jazz music as a theme for his poems “Jazzonia” and “Cabaret,” which he had not dared to write in black dialect—although he did represent black speech in the poem “Negro Dancers” (44).4 While this poem translated the energy of black dancers doing the Charleston, it could also be suspected of a plantation school use of dialect, showing the Negro dancers to be “primitive,” in the debasing sense of the term, as they danced and spoke ungrammatically. The inclusion of the lines “White folks, laugh! / White folks, pray!” (44) seems to indicate that Hughes was ironically deflecting the white gaze, excluding the whites from an all-black world of uninhibited dancing and singing, but the very inclusion of the white audience was a disruption, one which disappears in “The Weary Blues.” The title, “The Weary Blues,” is somewhat misleading because it is primarily a poem about the blues, about a blues song of the same name, which is quoted in the text. Beyond quotation, however, the poem is saturated with the blues, not only in its vocabulary, but in its use of rhyme and rhythm: for instance, it repeats a complete line (“He did a lazy sway . . . / He did a lazy sway . . .”) to recall a blues song. Of course, in a true blues song, the initial lines of each stanza are repeated; Hughes was to import this into later blues...

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