Langston Hughes and the Blues (review)

The release of the first paperback edition of Steven C. Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues, originally published in 1988, coincided with Hughes's one hundredth birthday on February 1, 2002. In this book Steven Tracy, himself a talented blues musician and the author of many contributions to blues scholarship, explores Hughes's appropriation of blues forms and themes in his poetry throughout his literary career. Though he does not make it explicit, Tracy is indebted in his literary folkloristic approach to Alan Dundes's emphasis on identification and interpretation when analyzing folk and literary genres.

The significant addition to the 2001 edition is the new introduction. Tracy reflects on the responses of initial reviewers, notes recent publications on the blues and on Hughes, and praises the rise in popularity of the blues in the United States during the past decade. Tracy also lists websites where blues music in all of its styles and forms is now available on compact discs rather than LP records; readers more familiar with Hughes than the blues will find this list especially useful. The rest of the book comprises endnotes, bibliography, discography, the original introduction, and three chapters that place poet and genre in historical, cultural, literary, and musical contexts. One strength of the book is the extensive endnotes, forty-three pages in all, which are "meant to take the reader back to the source, the elemental realm of the blues tradition that inspired Hughes, frequently by providing sources for the great recordings of blues performers who do not need but deserve our attention" (p. x).

In the first chapter, "Folklore and the Harlem Renaissance," Tracy draws on Dundes and Barre Toelken for functional definitions of folklore and relates them to the rise of the blues as marketable music during the 1920s. Tracy explores the attitudes of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals toward folk materials, dividing them into "the Old Guard and the New" (p. 17). Among the "Old Guard" triumvirate of W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, it was Johnson's understanding of folk music in particular that had the most influence on Hughes in his literary uses of the blues. Tracy places Hughes in the "New Guard" with Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, who understood the folk and their lore and championed both more readily than their predecessors.

In chapter 2, "Defining the Blues," Tracy effectively explains the complexity of the blues. Acknowledging that "there are many different types of blues" (p. 49), he offers an insightful overview of previous studies of the genre. He juxtaposes multiple definitions with singers and their songs performed and recorded over time in various settings. As a blues purist, Tracy favors the indigenous nature of the folk blues while accepting the inevitable commercialization and urbanization of popular blues forms. Tracy states that Hughes "wished to be 'authentic'" in his use of the blues, "though he knew he wanted his poems to do more than he felt his sources did" (p. 45). Less concerned with the African and European influences on the development of the blues, Hughes was more interested in the blues as an American art form.

In chapter 3, "Creating the Blues," Tracy delineates the characteristics of the musical composition of twelve-bar and eight-bar blues stanzas, making fruitful comparisons between blues performances and Hughes's lyrics. He correctly asserts that there is no substitute for partaking of a blues performance or listening to recordings of blues songs and that "there has been no system of musical notation devised that totally captures the blues as they are performed" (p. 145). Nevertheless, Tracy's own line and stanzaic transcriptions are effective. In addition, he offers cogent close readings of Hughes's ethnopoetical and typographical renderings of blueslike songs as poems. In conclusion, he shows how Hughes's uses of the blues in such earlier collections of his poetry as Fine Clothes to the Jew (Knopf, 1927) and Shakespeare in Harlem (Knopf...