The Weary Blues

Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Author Biography............................................................................................................................2
Spirit of Blues in Black Culture.......................................................................................................3
Blues Music as Way of life..............................................................................................................4
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................5
References:......................................................................................................................................5
Introduction
"The Weary Blues" is about black art's intensity and suffering. (Skansgaard,2020). A black blues
singer playing in a bar late in the night in Harlem describes the poem, the music of which
channels the misery of a racial society. For the speaker, this music is a kind of relief: to hear the
sorrow translated into a song, a speaker finds it calming and even therapeutic. But the blues
singer, for whom so much suffering and pain can be drained, has not the same effect. The tension
enables the poem to focus on both injustice and creativity: it suggests how excluded people find
consolation and strength in art, without shy away from the reality that this artistic process can be
emotionally taxing. This means that it acknowledges the beauty of black art and also the weight
of the suffering that led to its creation. The Blues is more than just music for The Weary Blues"
speaker – it conveys the pain and oppression black people have experienced in racism. The
music the speaker listens to is painful, and both "melancholy" and "sad." Even the piano the
blues singer performs appears to wow," as if he screamed in anguish. As the speaker states in
line 15, this music is from a black man's soul." Hence its suffering is directly connected to the
pain and trials of black experience in a racist society. His satisfaction therefore stems from the
manner in which his suffering is negotiated. The speaker feels a sort of relaxation and release
while listening to the blues artist. He yells, "O Blues, throughout the first stanza!
(Grinvalds,2019). "And "Blues Sweet! "The music emerges at these times to carry the speaker,
triggering cries of laughter and enjoyment. Music provides a recognition and a break from the
speaker's difficulties—which may account for why the speaker's success is so absorbed. The
poem thus indirectly indicates that black people fight and endure prejudice from musical forms
like the blues. However, the poem often calls attention to the expense of making such painful
music and performing it. The singer is not involved in the release of the speaker. When the Blues
singer comes home all night long, he sleeps "like a rock or a dead man." (Sawhney,2019) The
simile, literally, indicates only that the singer is very tired and is sleeping deep. But the
consequences and undertones of the similar are far darker. They propose that it's so painful and
exhausting for the blues singer to perform this music that he's almost dead when he's done.
Expressing his misery has sucked his life in a way. The Weary Blues therefore celebrates blues
as a way to convey black pain and to avoid and combat racial societies. However, it also
attentively tracks the costs of this resistance — the manner in which the artists channel and
convey such pain drain and diminish. Furthermore, The Weary Blues" is not merely a blues
description: the poem itself adopts blues shapes and rhythms. (Hertzberg McKnight,2019).
Hughes writes the poem and takes upon himself the weight of this misery, which mines the
suffering of his culture. At the same time, he offered the poetry as a source of celebration and
joy, maybe hoping that the reader would feel the relaxation and release. In this writing we are
going to talk about evocation to the spirit of the blues “The Weary Blues" brings. And its effects
as a way of life.

Author Biography
James Langston Hughes generally claimed he was born in Joplin, Missouri, on 1 February 1902,
but he was not fully certain, with no birth certificate. (Rahaman,2017) Perhaps this vulnerability
may be a sign of the oppressed existence of the world in which African Americans were held,
because of the confidentiality and inequality in the legal codes and accepted in society, as less
than full citizens. Carrie, Hughes' mother of James Langston Hughes, came from the African
American community on top stage. She ran away from home, however, to be dreaming of a
career on Broadway (her Uncle for example was an American ambassador, a Congressman
during Reconstruction, and finally the president of Virginia State University). She finally
married James Hughes, who had a high-ranking job in the black community, as a Pullman Porter
(who worked in the trains' sleeping coaches). Carrie finally served as a teacher in school, so a
stable middle class life should have been for the family. Hughes' father, however, could not
withstand his regular wounds because of his pride that black man's life meant in the United
States, so he moves to Mexico City. His wife was not there and his parents were divorced by the
time Langston was six years old.
As a child, Hughes was not born in Kansas or Ohio’s, but he felt all the dearer to the intense
prejudice faced by Black people living in the South. Hughes went to his father to visit in 1920,
while he was graduating from high school, he felt especially stinging when his white
schoolmates praised him for his rhythm, a myth about blacks. Hughes wrote "The Negro Speaks
of Rivers," a poem that is sometimes considered as his best poem, crossing the Mississippi river
in StLouis, Missouri. Next year, but only in publications like Crisis, he started publishing poetry
regularly to a black audience. Rich black skippers noticed his ability and paid a year to study at
Columbia University, but for the course, Hughes was too restless. He wanted to see the world as
a sailor but spent some months on a crew of mothball ships halfway across the Hudson River
because of some misunderstandings. He wrote the first draft of The Weary Blues during his work
in 1923 or 1924. Hughes moved into Washington to live with his mother, after a more rewarding
period of service which took him to Africa and to Europe; he worked there as a bus boy in a
restaurant in the hotel. He saw that VaChel was staying at the hotel, one of the most popular
white poets of the period, and slipped three of his poems quietly into his room, including The
Weary Blues." The next day Hughes saw himself in the newspaper as a major black poet, a
busboy who works. This was not a "discovery," as the poet Hughes was well known, but is an
example of the difference between the white and the black walls. In Chance, the poem was
written in 1925. Hughes started publishing in major journals such as the Vanity Fair with
Lindsay's help. Nearly immediately, his first book of poems was published in 1926 as The Tired
Blues. When more black community employers paid Hughes a full college at all-black Lincoln
University, he had a special part to play in book tours for his bachelors' summers. Hughes was a
prolific author during his entire life, writing new poems, novels, plays, libretto operas, child
literature and essays. White readers were the largest part of his audience. He also regularly
taught at the college level. He was a Harlem Renaissance leader in the twenties and thirties and
he remained in Harlem for his rest of his adult life. He died of complications after surgery on 22
May 1967.

Spirit of Blues in Black Culture

"The Weary Blues," through its songs, is a celebration of distinctive black culture. But the state
of black culture in the America of the 1920s is much more lamentable. Also in the north, in
prescribed zones of major urban cities Black were faced to be very narrowly segregated and had
to live apart from conventional culture (later called ghettos after the neighborhood that Jews
were restricted to in medieval Venice). So blacks had to establish a world of shadows, with their
own corporations and organizations enabling little communication with the white society in the
vicinity. Black musicians were as isolated as philosophers. (Brown, 2018) One of Hughes' big
differences in his career was his performance in the White World. Whilst Hughes had published
several poems in the national magazines for a number of years, Hughes was considered a young
poet because of the loneliness of two worlds as a whole when Vachel Lindsay "discovered" him.
Finally, in the movement known as negritude, Hughes sought a solution to the artistic issues of
segregation. In Paris, where it was a black expatriate of the French colonies, Hughes met with
the revolution, but became widely used by Black intellectuals around the world particularly in
Africa and the Caribbean. His principal concept was that the blacks should make for themselves
their own community, regardless of the white cultures that surrounded and rejected it
simultaneously. Negritude did not condemn West culture, as its adherents understood that
breaking out of the Western civilization, which had influenced their own experiences, was not
necessary and not even desirable. (Bird, G K,2019). The aim was to establish a black community
that would not be inferior if it were to be divided. Hughes invented the phrase 'Negro is lovely,'
(Graham,2020). that in time came in the 60s and said, 'Black is lovely,' as the concept percolated
into popular culture. The word negritude means 'blackness.' Although the international
movement of negritude gradually took on Harlem Renaissance feel, Hughes returned to this
setting as its main ambassador. As much as anything, Hughes desired liberty and equality.
However, he knew that it wasn't in his lifetime and thought that blacks should take advantage of
their sheltered, restricted cultural nature. However, The Weary Blues" is an early piece, full of
emotion rather than contemplation. It offers a view of black culture as condemned by its
oppression in the end.

Blues Music as Way of life

Blues is a music style that originally originated about 1900 in the black community of the Deep
South. On the early date, people usually performed it, partly as an expression of intensely felt
personal grief, but always as dance or entertainment musicians in black bars and clubs (the so-
called "juke joints"). (Stephane, 2019) The type of music is attributed not only to the music of
spirits, usually performed by the entire congregation in black churches, but also to songs sung in
the fields to control planting and harvesting. Although the African source of this music is
strongly debated and often loudly insisted that, unlike many types of music in the Caribbean
blacks that have evident and proven African ties, no research has ever connected any part of this
music with the African origins. The blues tend to be absolutely the invention of the African
American community, which is derived from the custom of the Protestant hymn adapted from
white culture.
Hughes laid on the blues because in the 1920s it was known as a symbol of black culture, both
by Black and White, and because the profound melancholy that impregnates his poem is
conveyed. Blues and spirits are therefore derived from the same church music and the blues
express spiritual significance for Hughes. But such a view wouldn't find a simple acceptation, as
the author points out in the article "Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues and Gospel," published in
his collection, Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art and His Continuous Influence: desperate
bourgeoisies. (Gale,2018)
It would seem extraordinary, even blasphemous, in some circles, particularly Christian, where
the blazes could be called "music of the devil." Hughes would throw one arm at the same time
around spiritual and gospel music, and the other around blues.
Yet Hughes was a mystical manifestation of black mankind's inner life, one and the same. In his
biography The Big Shore, as he wrote,
The underwater black music with its ever-present rhythm, with a force that is like the fire of the
human heart, its laughter and its radiating forces, is always the same as waves of the sea, coming
one after another, as the earth moving around the sun, night, day, night and day. The Big Sea of
Hughes autobiography is this music, this feeling. It's the blues that's weary.

Conclusion
"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes is a piano player who performs a slow, sad blues track
first published in 1925. This show is held in a club in the secluded New York City neighborhood
of Harlem. The poem meditates on the way to transforming this song into a beautiful and
cathartically feature, the pain and oppression of the black experience in America. The poem thus
focuses on Black Art's enormous beauty and the enormous suffering behind it. The writing gives
us an understanding of the situation when the author wrote the poem. The value of blues music in
the black community at that time was huge. Through the blues music we can understand the
misery of black community at that time.

References:
Skansgaard, Michael. "The Virtuosity of Langston Hughes: Persona, Rhetoric, and Iconography
in The Weary Blues." Modern Language Quarterly 81.1 (2020): 65-94.
Sawhney, Arpita. "Langston Hughes and the Deferred American Dream: A Study of Select
Poems." Journal of the Gujarat Research Society 21.11 (2019): 619-625.
Hertzberg McKnight, Ralph. "Putting Jazz on the Page:" The Weary Blues" and" Jazztet Muted"
by Langston Hughes." (2019).
Grinvalds, Melissa. "O Blues! Swaying too and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad
raggedy tune like a musical fool Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul (Hughes lines
10-15)." (2019).
Rahaman, Md Ataur. "Langston Hughes’ Poems: A Study of the Voice of Emancipation of the
Black Americans." Managing Editor: 103.
Brown, Lee B., David Goldblatt, and Theodore Gracyk. Jazz and the Philosophy of Art.
Routledge, 2018.
Bird, Gemma K. "The Négritude Movement." Foundations of Just Cross-Cultural Dialogue in
Kant and African Political Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. 83-126.
Graham, Shane. Cultural Entanglements: Langston Hughes and the Rise of African and
Caribbean Literature. University of Virginia Press, 2020.
Stephane, Beugre Zouankouan. "“Fantasy in Purple”: Langston Hughes’ Love and Dedicatee to
Blues and Jazz Music." International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature 7.7
(2019): 10-23.
Gale, Cengage Learning. A Study Guide for Langston Hughes's" Black Nativity". Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2018.