Both Hughes and the Musician in ââåthe Weary Bluesã¢â❠Use Art to Explore Themes Related to

While Langston Hughes was non a Jazz musician, he is known every bit a leader of the Jazz poetry genre. His poetic forms, remembered for their spirit, contain many stylistic devices also characteristic of music, especially the blues. This fully American music stemmed from the mixing of cultures, from the ii traditions from which Langston Hughes was birthed. His piece of work represents a culmination of the African-American, post-Earth War I, and Jazz traditions. Merely, for the sake of length in this post, nosotros'll but expect at the African-American and blues traditions.

The African-American slave tradition tore people from their homes and introduced them to new living conditions and to new music. Earlier slave music is notably rhythmic, and this lends itself easily to poetry. The rhythms came from the piece of work being done, monotonous tasks such as hammering or pushing weights, and this combined with a new vernacular of African shouts and hollers with the English of America. It created something personal, for each slave on each plantation had their ain story to sing nigh.

The beauty of this tradition is that even though every slave had their own story, they chose to combine them to create a community of song. The "freedom song" then began to contain repeated lines that a leader could sing and the group could finish.

A visual way of thinking about information technology is with letters. AAB is a typical call and response course that is used throughout all of history. In it, a leader sings a line (A), the people repeat that line (A again), and then the leader creates a new line (B) that could be a call to action or a transition into the next poesy.

This call and response form created standards for their music while still allowing the singers to continually create new lines. Jazz, however, is non a sole kid of slave songs and spirituals.

Jazz is a music birthed of freedom.

The dejection fully developed as a form when slaves were freed, and they spread around America in attempts to locate their lost relatives and a meliorate life. In the process, they shared their life stories with those who would mind. Langston Hughes travelled widely and discovered new and interesting people who all influenced his work.

Hughes draws upon the story-telling tradition in "The Weary Blues" equally the speaker of this poem appears to be discovering the blues for the first time.  The verse form begins with the elementary action of listening "down on Lenox Avenue the other night," with the nonchalance of the occasion of the setting causing it to appear that the speaker merely stumbles upon the music and discovers something vivid and stirring.ⁱ  It is altogether normal, in keeping with the customs tradition and Langston Hughes'due south tendency toward travel, to find new experience in an everyday situation.  The telling of these everyday stories affected the structure of the songs in which they were told.

The early dejection structure based itself off of the early on English ballad, which was perfect for the sharing of stories, and that evolved into the now-traditional twelve-bar AAB blues course.

Traditional form dictates that twelve measures contain iii sets of 2 lines of repeated text followed by a third, differing line.  This hearkens back to the call and response singing of earlier times, which remains a part of tradition to this day, through the prevalence of the blues.  Jazz began as the dejection, and equally Jazz poetry analyst Jeffrey Allen writes, "You can accept the blues without Jazz, but no Jazz without the blues."²  The blues are such a fundamental office of the genre of Jazz that one cannot imagine a Jazz earth without blues.

Much of the power of the blues lies more in its language, notwithstanding, than in its form.  The dejection embody the American vernacular engendered by the mixing of the African and American cultures, and it allows the poet and musician to tell his or her story in a dialect close to the heart, for information technology is the linguistic communication surrounding the composer.²

In the case of "The Weary Blues," Langston Hughes reinforces the AAB traditional blues just without actually repeating text. While the lines of the narrator practice not repeat, the number of syllables for each line does repeat and and then varies on the third line. The poem begins with ii lines of ten syllables each: "Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon," followed by i line of half dozen syllables: "I heard a Negro play." The meter in these lines, however, does not remain constant, which signifies Hughes employment of the traditional African sense of rhythm.

Dawdling a drowsy syncopated melody,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Downward on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an sometime gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory fundamental
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Dejection!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy melody like a musical fool.
Sweet Dejection!
Coming from a black human being'southward soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that one-time piano moan—
"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."
Thump, thump, thump, went his pes on the floor.
He played a few chords so he sang some more—
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't exist satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied—
I own't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that melody.
The stars went out and and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his caput.
He slept like a stone or a human being that'southward expressionless.

Hughes uses the aforementioned technique in most of the lines of the narrator, such as "With his ebony easily on each ivory fundamental. / He made that poor piano moan with melody. / O Blues!" In limiting himself to maintaining two lines of the same number of syllables, Hughes allows himself to improvise within a framework, to redefine meter within a specific structure, which makes it effective, for it is deliberate. "The Weary Blues," however, does contain lines with syllables that do not seem to represent to any other line and seem not to serve a purpose.

These unmatched lines represent the dejection spirit in its attempt at improvising around rhythm. Since dissonance and disjoint rhythms narrate Jazz, the representation of Jazz in the meter of specific lines displays the agreement of blues rhythm that Langston Hughes must have possessed.

While Langston Hughes was not a musician himself, he yearned to be, and to fulfill his dreams of music, he read his poetry to audiences with live accompaniment. He collaborated with famous Jazz legends like Westward.C. Handy, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, and Louis Armstrong, some of whom may have inspired his "The Weary Blues."

What are your thoughts on the blues, Jazz, or Jazz verse? Share in the comments below!

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Happy musicking!

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Works Cited

1. Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, 8th Edition. New York: W.Due west. Norton and Company, 2013.
2. Allen, Jeffrey Renard. "Distinguished Breakage": The Jazz Poetry Of Sterling D. Plumpp." Arkansas Review: A Journal Of Delta Studies 36.3 (2005): 198-202.

Amy King is a music theory and piano instructor currently residing in the Chicago area.

• Master of Music in Music Theory and Cognition from Northwestern University (June 2020)
• Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance and English Literature from High Indicate University (May 2016)
• where she received the Outstanding Senior Music Major Award, which is awarded to ane single graduating music student per year

Amy has been didactics private pianoforte lessons for 12+ years, taught classroom music theory for v years, directed choirs spanning ages iv–25, led and arranged for a university a capella grouping, and composed and arranged music for various soloists and ensembles.

cooperhichislon75.blogspot.com

Source: https://girlinbluemusic.com/langston-hughes-and-the-weary-blues/

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