In “The Weary Blues,” Langston Hughes plays us the song of a tired black musician. The speaker recites a performance of a drained, drooping black blues singer. The musician sways and he drones and his piano moans. He “puts [his] troubles on de shelf” (Hughes line 22), what I presume refers to his temporary evasion into his art. As the reader (especially sharing his race), I sympathize with this man. The tone and mood of this poem are somber, juxtaposing the performative attitude of a blues singer. On stage, he might sing and play lively tunes, but inside he’s broken, filled with loose pieces of a weary soul after living in a country that opposes him. 

History is by far my worst subject, so, when reading literature, I often have a hard time connecting the writing with the historical significance. After studying the Harlem Renaissance, this piece’s significance was magnified for me. In Harlem, the 1920s were a whimsical era, filled with creative art forms by expressive blacks. Being black in America was exhausting and lonely. Depleted and consumed, African Americans escaped in soulful music, powerful writing, and vivid visual art, attempting to share their truths to a nation still broadly unaccepting of them. Some black artists, like Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer, promoted the separation of race from art. Other black artists, namely Langston Hughes, demanded black art dive into and fully articulate racial struggles. Hughes plunges into his disappointment with black artists who desire to remove the plight of their race from their art in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”. He specifically states, “Let the blare of Negro Jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand…. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” I found “The Weary Blues” to be an explicit encapsulation of the form he desired black art to assume while delivering the impact he felt it needed to convey. In his poem, the speaker details a black blues singer–an inexplicit focal point being the man is black above all other descriptions. Blues is an escape for this man; during the day, he murmurs his laments to an audience he hopes can relate or understand, but at night, he sleeps deeply and without hope, like a dead man. 

The blues singer does “a lazy sway… a lazy sway” (Hughes lines 6-7) as he sits upon his “rickety stool” and plays his “sad raggy tune like a musical fool” (Hughes lines 12-13). Hughes’ description forces us to see this man–a black man beaten down by a white world–and listen to his lament, one that lulls of the bleakness and desolation that accompanies the black experience in America. Hughes’ use of the term “musical fool” insists that, even though this man pours his soul into his expression, he still has a jester-like purpose to the audience. Though freed from the oppression of slavery, blacks found themselves being used as entertainment pawns during the Harlem Renaissance. Even the speaker rejoices in the man’s song, saying “Sweet blues!” and “O blues!” (Hughes lines 11 & 14). The Weary Blues is a hard suffering for the musician, but a beautiful suffering for his crowd. I idolize Hughes for continuously pushing against the deterrents he faced while promoting black art. He was, arguably, the biggest driving force in normalizing blackness in creation. 

I particularly appreciate the musicality of the poem. The poem is written in free verse that mimics spoken English. It does not follow the pattern of traditional European poetry; it follows the form of blues and represents blues’ qualities as being just as distinguished and sophisticated as European art forms. In reading it aloud, I had a difficult time not singing it–there is a sort of slow, melodic sway hidden in the wording. The repetition of the “d” consonant imitates the internal sound of a piano key being pressed. The repetition of lines matches that of a song’s chorus. 

The interior of the poem matches Hughes’ goal for its exterior motive; it’s an outsider’s view of a black man’s troubles enjoyed as a rhythmic form of entertainment. For those that choose to listen (or read deeper into the poem), there are surface-deep revelations that invite the audience to sympathize with him. In paralleling his own beliefs of how black art should be felt, Hughes created a poem that explores black performance–how it is the cry of an artist and the music to a carefree audience.