Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes

Author(s): David Chinitz

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 177-192
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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LITERACY AND AUTHENTICITY

The Blues Poems of Langston Hughes

by David Chinitz

While the adaptation of oral culture to literary ends is never uncomplicated, the
accommodation of blues to poetry presents particular difficulties. "Blues," writes folk
musicologist Paul Oliver, "is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands up
particularly well when written down" (8). A poet who wants to write blues can avoid
this trap by poeticizing the form-but this is only to fall into another trap, for blues
made literary read not like refined folk song but like bad poetry. For Oliver, there is
no safe passage between this Scylla and Charybdis: the poetry of the blues eludes the
self-conscious imitator inevitably (9-14). We need not concur with the absoluteness of
this judgment to appreciate its force.
Langston Hughes was the first writer to grapple with the inherent difficulties of
blues poetry, and he succeeded-not always, but often-in producing poems that
manage to capture the quality of genuine blues in performance while remaining
effective as poems. This essay will show how in inventing blues poetry Hughes solved
the two closely related problems I have sketched: first, how to write blues lyrics in
such a way that they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the blues
form poetically without losing all sense of authenticity.

I
It is sometimes useful to define "blues poetry" in the broadest possible terms, as
Onwuchekwa Jemie does, for example, in his introduction to Hughes's work: "The
blues poem . .. is one that, regardless of form, utilizes the themes, motifs, language,
and imagery common to popular blues literature" (44). Such a definition usefully
stresses how pervasively the blues influence Hughes's art; in fact, Jemie is quite
willing to classify much of Hughes's prose as blues poetry. For the purposes of this
essay, however, I am considering the category of blues poetry to include those lyrics
that make use of blues imagery, formulae and rhythms, as well as a stanza that is at
least closely related to the normative blues form. This reasonably narrow definition
makes systematic analysis of Hughes's blues poems fruitful, for within this class of
poems a certain consistency of technique can be identified.
Blues use a number of stanzaic forms, but the three-line "AAB" stanza is so
ubiquitous as to have become the standard from which all others are seen as deviating.
Callaloo19.1 (1996) 177-192

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This form is generated by a single line which is first repeated, often with minor
impromptu variations, and then rhymed in a line that elaborates on or answers it:
My gal's got legs, yes, legs like a kangaroo.
My gal's got legs, legs like a kangaroo.
If you don't watch out she'll hop all over you. (qtd. in Hughes and
Bontemps 395)
The second and third lines are often referred to as the repeatline and the responseline.
(In Hughes's poetry, each line is halved so that the stanza is rendered in six lines rather
than three; lines 3-4, in this case, function together as repeat lines and lines 5-6 as
response lines.) In performance the blues stanza generates dramatic suspense as the
audience anticipates the satisfying closure of rhyme and sense in the response line;
this suspense gives the singer or lyricist opportunities for irony, surprise, humor,
understatement and other effects. The repeat line heightens the suspense by delaying
the resolution.
Hughes was attracted to the blues particularly by what the music represented to
him: an expression of the resilience and tragedy of the African-American lower class.
To some extent Hughes romanticized this social group, with which he always
identified but to which he himself never really belonged. What Hughes called "just
plain folks" are, in his portraiture, never merely "plain": they are sensitive, passionate, and frequently wise, drawing unconvoluted wisdom from their very lack of
sophistication. Most significantly, Hughes's black proletariat is endowed with an
inexhaustible energy that veils and relieves its suffering. It is this quality that is
expressed with particular clarity in both jazz and the blues:
For sad as Blues may be, there's almost always something humorous about them-even if it's the kind of humor that laughs to
keep from crying.' ("Songs" 160)
Hughes's explanation for this coincidence of opposing emotions was straightforward: the disenfranchisement of the African-American masses and the various
frustrations it engendered demanded indirect outlets supplied by the subculture. The
blues were "sad songs" because they manifested the "hopeless weariness" of an
oppressed people; they were "gay songs because you had to be gay or die' (Big Sea
209). Hughes sought to catch this "blues spirit"-this compensatory expression of
conflicting emotions-in his poetry, in part by imitating the blues themselves.
There are as many blues styles as there are regions and periods of blues activity.
The one distinction of real importance for Hughes, however, separates the genres
often referred to as "folk blues" and "classic blues"-a classification that points to
differences in performer (indigenous talents or touring professionals), in patronage
(local community or mass audience), in style (traditional or polished), in creation
(improvised or composed) and in transmission (oral or written). Classic blues are
comparatively self-conscious, structurally complex, and carefully packaged, a stage
sophistication of the original folk product. Popularized by great singers like Ma
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C A L L A L OO
Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, the "vaudeville blues," as they are also called, won
over many of the early blues admirers among the intelligentsia. Folklorists, however,
including Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown, have often rejected the classic
blues as mercenary and inauthentic. Hughes did not share in this condemnation; on
the contrary, as Steven Tracy has shown, when Hughes discusses the blues with any
specificity, he seems almost always to have the classic blues in mind.2 Though Hughes
was intimately familiar with the folk blues, as a northern urbanite his access to the
music flowed naturally through commercial channels.3 Ever catholic in his tastes, he
evidently thought of classic blues singers as products of the same folk culture and did
not object to their merging of blues with popular song.
That Hughes writes his best blues poetry when he tries least to imitate the folk
blues is a critical commonplace.4 So seen, Hughes is too self-conscious, too determined to romanticize the African-American proletariat, too intent on reproducing
what he takes to be the quaint humor and naive simplicity of the folk blues to write
successfully in that vein. Tracy argues that in extending the blues into another art
form, Hughes actually identifies with the professional blues composer, through
whose influence his own blues are "limited in expression" ("Tune" 73). Like the
commercial songwriter, Hughes is determined to write lyrics more like the blues than
the blues themselves.
This critical consensus needs to be challenged, for Hughes's blues poemsincluding his best in the genre-are in fact considerably closer stylistically to the folk
blues than to the deliberately cultivated classic blues. It is true that Hughes emphasizes his own reading of the blues, using the form to reinforce a particular construction of the African-American character. But he conveys his perceptions as a folk artist
should: through an accumulation of details over the entire span of his blues oeuvre,
rather than by overloading each poem with quaintness and naivete. The differences
between Hughes's lyrics and the folk blues are better explained by the exigencies of
writing blues for the printed page than by an identification on Hughes's part with the
commercial lyricist. And these differences are not inevitably to Hughes's disadvantage: they are just differences.
Hughes's "Young Gal's Blues" will serve to illustrate the relationship between his
poetry and the folk blues:
I'm gonna walk to de graveyard
'Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
I'm gonna walk to de graveyard
'Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
Cause when I'm dead some
Body'll have to walk behind me.
I'm goin' to de po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
Goin' to de po' house
To see ma old Aunt Clew.
When I'm old an' ugly
I'll want to see somebody, too.
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De po' house is lonely

An' de grave is cold.
0, de po' house is lonely,
De graveyard grave is cold.
But I'd rather be dead than
To be ugly an' old.
When love is gone what
Can a young gal do?
When love is gone, 0,
What can a young gal do?
Keep on a-lovin' me, daddy,
Cause I don't want to be blue. (Fine Clothes 83)
Arnold Rampersad has observed that virtually all of the poems in Fine Clothes to the
Jew, the 1927 collection in which Hughes essentially originated blues poetry, fall
deliberately within the "range of utterance of common black folk" (141). This surely
applies to "Young Gal's Blues," in which Hughes avoids the conventionally "poetic"
language and ideas that the subjects of death, aging and love sometimes elicit in his
ordinary lyric poetry. But how folkish is the voice we hear in this poem? Spellings like
po' and de point up the speaker's dialectical pronunciation, yet her grammar is
standard. Her stanzas cohere, too, with a logic that would be remarkable in an
improvised folk composition, where the verses generally relate to each other not
through a rational progression but through a consistency of mood, music and theme.
But Hughes is aware of this discrepancy. Had he wished to write a neat, polished
poem, he could have ended "Young Gal's Blues" with the third stanza, which resolves
the opposition set up by its predecessors with a satisfying finality. Instead, Hughes
sacrifices what would have been a most un-folkish tidiness by having the girl step
outside the apparent parameters of the poem to elaborate on her fear of loneliness. The
structural superfluity of the fourth stanza, in other words, is functional.
One of the challenges facing the blues poet is the portrayal of character in the
absence of a performer. Working on his small canvas, Hughes brings his "young gal"
to life in a few brush strokes. These include her charitable activities in the opening
stanzas and her pretended explanation for them-"pretended" because Cora Lee and
Aunt Clew have put her in mind of her own future, and not, of course, vice versa. The
intrusive frankness of the phrase "old an' ugly" in a verse that describes the girl's
kindness to her aunt, the decisive conclusion of the third stanza, and the struggle
against melancholy in the last all contribute to a quick and effective delineation of the
girl's character and frame of mind. Her turns of thought are fresh and sometimes
surprising, but their development is well controlled by the poet. Without calling
undue attention to the poet's craft, for instance, the first two stanzas delicately create
the dilemma that is resolved in the third. The girl seems to be depicting two similar
situations when she is actually setting up an opposition between contrasting evils. Yet
the inverted chronological sequence-death in the first stanza, old age in the secondimplies that the speaker is not sketching a narrative of her future; she does not expect
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C A L L A L OO
to grow old and die, but to choose one fate or the other. Hughes thus maintains the
illusion of an inconsequential folk-blues logic, while the structural grammar of the
poem takes the place of the performing personality that a blues audience normally has
before it.
To see what Hughes's blues poetry might have been like if he had truly adopted the
vaudeville blues as his model, one need only contrast "Young Gal's Blues" with the
"Golden Brown Blues," a lyric Hughes wrote for composer W.C. Handy:
Dusky eyes tantalize,
Hair just like Moses';
Finger tips, sugar lips
Sweet as red roses.
Ma Beale street Mamma some charmer,
Ma sweet Golden Brown.
Watch your man-understand?
All the men's ravin'.
Better see 'mediately
That he's behavin'.
Man in the moon in a swoon
Fell for this Golden Brown. (Handy 91)
Hughes might well have invoked the sharp distinction he made between his poetry
and his verse in the case of this commercial-style blues (Big Sea 53). The continual
internal rhyme is alien to the folk blues, which, as improvisations, tend to eschew
complex prosody. The images and allusions are, likewise, uncharacteristic of the
traditional blues, as is the diction, which is conspicuously remote from the common
"range of utterance." The restraint of "Young Gal's Blues" is obvious in comparison.
Even when, after the quoted introductory verses, "Golden Brown Blues" modulates
into standard AAB form, the lyrics remain slicker than Hughes's blues poems ever
get, though by no means better as poetry:
Ashes to ashes, ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust, right down to dust.
Ashes to ashes, ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust, right down to dust.
Golden Brown done got him,
An' I'm bound to rust.
Yet this song was written only a year after the publication of the brilliant blues poems
in Fine Clothes to the Jew (Rampersad 160). Clearly Hughes could write vaudeville
blues when he chose to, and just as clearly his poetic efforts were in another direction.
If he considered the blues poet a relative of the classic blues composer, they remained
distant cousins.5
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II
The success of Hughes's blues poems depends on a self-concealing art. Art there
must be if his lyrics are to "stand up well when written down," yet the art must not
be too visible if the poems are to preserve any semblance of authenticity. It is a
precarious balance. To imitate the published lyrics of the music industry would not
do, as "Golden Brown Blues" makes clear. But to replicate the rough verses of the folk
singers would not suffice to convey, in print, the feeling of their blues. The stylistic
devices that add excitement and emotion to blues performance cannot be captured in
poetry by mere transcription:
I can tell the wind is rising, the leaves
trembling on the tree[s]
trembling on the trees.
I can tell the wind is rising, the leaves
trembling on the trees,
uunh.
All I need my little sweet woman, to keep
my company,
uunh,
my company. (qtd. in Charters 19)
It hardly needs saying that the effect of Robert Johnson's singing is not reproduced by
this transcription's faithful rendering of his moaning and repetition. The only solution for Hughes was to write poems that could be heard as and even sung as folkblues,
but that reproduced only sparingly their specifically oral elements.
There are occasions, however, when Hughes will risk introducing into his blues
poems what can only be read as oral survivals:
Road, road, road, O!
Road, road ... road ... road, road!
Road, road, road, O!
On de No'thern road.
These Mississippi towns ain't
Fit fer a hoppin' toad. (Fine Clothes87)
Hughes "could never carry a tune," but he did sing his blues poems to himself while
composing them (Big Sea 217). These final lines of his "Bound No'th Blues" transcribe
the vocal patterns of that internal performance, an imaginative effort to render the
lyric as an actual blues vocalist might. Of course Hughes must then depend on his
reader to reconstitute the original imagined performance, which will require the
reader to have at least some experience as a blues listener; one can easily conceive the
puzzlement such a stanza as this must otherwise generate. As silent poetry, most of
the stanza is essentially unreadable. For "Bound No'th Blues" is a blues poem, and
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C A L L A LO O
relies at least as much on the conventions of the blues as on those of poetry for the
context in which its technique is intelligible.
But "Bound No'th Blues" is not a transcribed blues lyric, either: it is a blues poem,
and rather than relying completely on the blues tradition to make sense of his last
stanza, Hughes constructs a context for it in the poem as a whole. The opening of the
first stanza, like that of the last, uses repetition to recreate the interminable stretch of
the road:
Goin' down de road, Lawd,
Goin' down de road.
Down de road, Lawd,
Way, way down de road.
The repeat line of the second stanza continues this narrow focus and injects some
more of the performance elements that will dominate the closing stanza:
Road's in front o' me,
Nothin' to do but walk.
Road's in front o' me,
Walk ... and walk ... and walk.
The response lines of the first two stanzas, meanwhile, have introduced the speaker's
wish for a traveling companion:
Got to find somebody
To help me carry dis load.
I'd like to meet a good friend
To come along an' talk.
The third stanza takes up this second theme and then discards it with the lament that
"ever friend you finds seems / Like they try to do you bad." Nothing remains to the
speaker now, having dismissed his hope, but to trudge the long road north, and
nothing remains to the poem but to express this single, tedious reality-thus the
twelve-fold repetition of "road," punctuated with two exclamations of "0," that
dominates the first four lines of the last stanza. To make the situation tolerable, the
final response line laughs to keep from crying (Waldron 147). If Hughes relies on the
reader's knowledge of an oral culture to make this ending readable, he is also
determined to justify it with a rigorous poetic logic.
Hughes's most common strategy for concealing his art is to work below the surface
of a homely diction-even to exploit a deliberate verbal drabness. It is quite true, as
Tracy claims, that Hughes seldom rises to the "startling or breathtaking" heights of
language that such blues artists as Peetie Wheatstraw and Robert Johnson achieve
(LangstonHughes 187-88). And it is natural for enthusiasts to adopt these most poetic
of folk blues as their touchstone of blues excellence.6 But it is also true that Hughes
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could not have written the kind of blues that Wheatstraw and Johnson sang without
drawing the sort of attack that Paul Oliver fires at a couple of arty stanzas from

SterlingBrown's"TornadoBlues"(10-11).7

To avoid poeticizingthe blues, Hughes is

willing to forego certain possibilities of the form. He would rather have his blues
poems under- than overdressed.
When he is successful, however, Hughes plays off the plain language of his blues
poems to produce powerful effects. Much of his "Down and Out," for example, is a
purposely flat springboard from which moments of intense desperation suddenly
leap:
Baby, if you love me
Help me when I'm down and out.
If you love me, baby,
Help me when I'm down and out,
Cause I'm a po' gal
Nobody gives a damn about. (Shakespeare101)
The bitter excess of the last line strikes with hammer force precisely because everything that preceded it struck with so little. The second stanza works the same way:
De credit man's done took ma clothes
And rent time's most nigh here.
Credit man's done took ma clothes.
Rent time's nearly here.
I'd like to buy a straightenin' comb,
An' I needs a dime fo' beer.
The dull complaint of the first two lines is beaten still flatter in the repeat lines, which
break it into two sentences. The next two lines-unexpected, eccentric, almost inconsequent-disrupt the poem's placid surface. The persona, to this point a cardboard
character, suddenly reveals herself in these two central lines as a woman desperate to
lose her identity or at least to drown it in alcohol. The straightening comb introduces
a racial dimension; one wonders how much of the singer's predicament can be
attributed, synecdochically, to her nappy hair. But then, as Tracy points out, she'd
only like the comb; she needs the beer (LangstonHughes 242). Almost by themselves
these two lines render the singer three-dimensional, a pathetic and wretched figure
where an undifferentiated character type, the down-and-out woman, had stood
moments before.
These stanzas from "Down and Out" work by flashing moments of poignancy
against an unimposing verbal and emotional backdrop. In the last stanza Hughes
finally underreaches, bringing the poem to a rather flaccid ending:
Oh, talk about yo' friendly friends
Bein' kind to youYes, talk about yo' friendly friends
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Bein' kind to youJust let yo'self git down and out
And then see what they'll do.
This conclusion adds so little to the poem that in his SelectedPoems Hughes dropped
the stanza altogether, opting instead to end by repeating the crucial "I need a dime fo'
beer" as a brief coda (147).
Hughes's blues poems, like most of his work, are not replete with delicately
calculated formal devices. Hughes did, however, exercise some of the options available in the print medium, both to simulate the characteristics of oral performance and
to achieve certain visual and aural effects. At the simplest level, he used typographyparticularly indentation and italics-to indicate changes of tempo and voice. Hughes
also employed a variety of blues stanzas, ranging from the standard AAB to longer
and more elaborate structures resembling those of the classic blues.8
Like most song lyrics, blues are not metered in the traditional poetic sense. The
blues artist has, to an extraordinary degree, free reign to insert unstressed syllables
between the musical beats, and on the other hand to draw out a single word or syllable
melismatically over several beats:
x /x
x
/
/
/
x
x /x
Don't ya hear me ... ee ... ee .. . ee callin' you ... oo? (Ledbetter)
The rhythm is further complicated by syncopation, which dislocates the vocal stresses
from the musical downbeats. Nevertheless, each line of a blues lyric is sung over
approximately two musical bars-each with four beats, the first and third accentedplus the first beat in a third bar (1 2 3 4 l 1 2 3 4 l 1); the remainder of the four-bar
phrase is left open for an instrumental "break," or fill. As a result, the number of
stresses in each blues line tends toward five. And since the stressed and unstressed
beats alternate, the musical phrase, without confining the blues to anything like strict
meter, provides a framework over which lines of iambic pentameter naturally fit:9
I hate to see de ev'nin' sun go down.
It's too late, too late, too late, too late, too late!
See See Rider, see what you done done!
Good mornin', blues; (1) blues, how do you do?10
Hughes's blues poems adhere to this metrical skeleton with somewhat greater
regularity than the true folk blues, in which "O Alberta, 0 Alberta" and even
"Mmmmmm" are perfectly plausible lines. This rhythmic freedom, an asset in the
performance setting, partly accounts for the failure of blues to transfer well to the
printed page. In developing his blues poetry Hughes had to correct for this difficulty.
Formally speaking, the AAB blues stanza, with its rough iambic pentameter, turns
out to be a cousin of the (AB) heroic couplet. The intrusion of the repeat line makes the
blues stanza less supple; it discourages the fluid enjambment that the couplet form
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invites, keeping the verbal phrase in synch with the musical. The rhythmic looseness
of the blues, however, opens up other possibilities in compensation. In both cases the
expectation of rhyme and syntactic closure endows the form with exceptional potential for ironic deflation or surprise. Certain forms of wit come naturally to poets
working in either form; for example, the anticlimax which Pope so effectively exploits
is also common in Hughes:
I'm goin' down to de river
An' I ain't goin' there to swim.
Goin' down to de river,
Ain't goin' there to swim.
Ma true love's left me, an'
I'm goin' there to think about him. (Fine Clothes 81)
Hughes also renewed the possibility of enjambment by writing out his blues in
half-lines, so that each of his syntactical units spreads over two lines of print.
Hughes's line breaks generally reflect such nuances of oral performance as breaths
and vocal pauses, but he often turns them to still greater poetic advantage. Typically,
Hughes will choose to end a line on a minor word. This strategy heightens expectations of the syntactical conclusion, paralleling a harmonic resolution in the music. It
also isolates the ensuing line so that visually, at least, it stands alone as a grammatical
unit, as in this stanza from "Bad Man":
I beats ma wife an'
I beats ma side gal too.
Beats ma wife an'
Beats ma side gal too.
Don't know why I do it but
It keeps me from feelin' blue. (Fine Clothes21)
The overhanging an' links the first and second (and third and fourth) lines, strengthening the structural parallelism of the lines and therefore the implied equation
between the wife and the "side girl." It never occurs to the "bad man," as he
enumerates his own faults, that his having both a wife and a side girl might be one of
them; the enjambment highlights his failure to distinguish between the two women.
The placement of but at the end of line 5 is also significant, since it turns the last line
into a self-sufficient explanatory statement that neutralizes the professed uncertainty
of the previous line. Hughes's line breaks quite often carry meaning in this way.
A related tactic is the deliberate variation of the repeat lines. Reproduction of blues
performance is again half the purpose, for blues singers regularly make slight changes
when they reiterate the first line of each verse. But again Hughes subtly exploits an
oral element for poetic opportunities. The opening lines of "Bad Man," for instance,
suggest that the speaker's character is imposed on him by others:
I'm a bad, bad man
Cause everybody tells me so.
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But this man is not about to complain of being misunderstood. He continues:

I'm a bad, bad man.
Everybody tells me so.
I takes ma meanness and ma licker
Everywhere I go.
In the repeat lines, the persona affirms the common judgment by reasserting it
without qualification or explanation. In fact, it now transpires that the unanimity of
public opinion is cause for swagger. Thrust into the role of the bad man, the speaker
plays it to the hilt, concluding:
I'm so bad I
Don't even want to be good.
So bad, bad, bad I
Don't even want to be good.
I'm goin' to de devil an'
I wouldn't go to heaben if I could.
The man's very first sentence has betrayed him, though. The reader has known from
the outset that the man's assertion of agency is largely a matter of bravado, of putting
the best face on a cycle that he cannot escape. The speaker must be a bad man; he no
longer has any choice but to bear out the general representation of himself. In this
context the confusion of "Don't know why I do it but / It keeps me from feelin' blue"
makes all the more sense: the blues that inevitably befall the man who must be bad can
be assuaged only by further badness-in this case, by domestic violence.

III
Many of Hughes's most effective strategies for blues poetry-as well as some of the
pitfalls that even Hughes could not always avoid-are evident in "Out of Work." It
begins:
I walked de streets till
De shoes wore off my feet.
I done walked de streets till
De shoes wore off my feet.
Been lookin' for a job
So's that I could eat.
I couldn't find no job
So I went to de WPA.
Couldn't find no job
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So I went to de WPA.
WPA man told me:
You got to live here a year and a day. (Shakespeare40-41)
The demands of narrative coherence, unincumbent upon the folk blues artist, sometimes leave Hughes flat footed. In the first stanza, the lack of energy in the response
lines may be an intentional irony, but the next stanza then ought to pick up the
dramatic pace. Instead, six lines of drab narration follow-just a bit of plot that needs
to be gotten over with. The succeeding stanza, however, is beautifully gauged:
A year and a day, Lawd,
In this great big lonesome town!
A year and a day in this
Great big lonesome town!
I might starve for a year but
That extra day would get me down.
In the last line of this ingeniously ironic stanza, the speaker affects weakness to level
an indirect criticism at the senseless policies of the bureaucracy. What gives the irony
its bite is firstly the power of understatement, secondly the sense of anticipation that
leads up to it, and finally the stanza's indirection, which disguises its target. The
dagger remains hidden until the thrust is half-way home. As in all standard-form
blues poems, the anticipation is created partly by the simple regularity of the poem's
rhymes and structure, which telegraph the eventual arrival of a satisfying denouement, and partly by the repetition, which postpones this conclusion. The enjambment
of the word but here works to the same end by adding the expectation of a grammatical
resolution. What cloaks the dagger is chiefly the stanza's momentary shift of focus
away from the WPA. For four lines the speaker seems merely to bemoan his situation;
in this respect, too, the delaying repeat lines prove useful. But as Tracy points out, the
variation in the repetition, which leaves in this enjambed so that "Great big lonesome
town" can stand on its own, shifts the complaint from its apparent object, the
postponement of employment, to another source of misery, the town itself (Langston
Hughes 149). The actual target of the terminal irony-"the extremes to which the
system will go to keep a man down" (Jemie 40)-is thrice hidden: behind the misery
of joblessness, behind the heartlessness of the city, and behind the speaker's ostensibly self-directed laughter, as though his strength would really give out precisely on
the 366th day.
Other seemingly casual artistic maneuvers have significant effects in the poem's
last stanza:
Did you ever try livin'
On two-bits minus two?
I say did you ever try livin'
On two-bits minus two?
Why don't you try it, folks,
And see what it would do to you?
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"Two bits," a proverbial sign of cheapness, would be hard enough to live on; to have
them proffered and then snatched away by the end of the line conveys the straits of
the unemployed with a bitter wit. The addition of "I say" to the beginning of the repeat
lines gives them an insistent quality, as if to force the reader to read the question as
something more than rhetorical. The word you here is meant to be taken personallyan implication that is borne out in the last lines, which urge the audience to imagine
itself in the speaker's position (Waldron 148).
It seems fair to say, though, that "Out of Work" has run out of gas-that is, it has
passed its emotional and structural culmination-some time before this ending. Final
anticlimax is not unique to this poem, either; in fact, critic George Kent has complained that often in Hughes's blues poems "the last stanza seems to lose intensity"
(199). Yet as we saw with "Young Gal's Blues," anticlimax can be quite purposeful.
"Midwinter Blues," which Kent singles out for condemnation, actually illustrates
another such design:
I'm gonna buy me a rose bud
An' plant it at ma back door.
Gonna buy me a rose bud
And plant it at ma back door.
So when I'm dead they
Won't need no flowers from de store. (Fine Clothes 84)
This sentiment, according to Kent, "requires the voice of the blues singer to maintain
intensity and to assert the toughness of spirit characteristic of the blues" (199). But the
ironic misdirection of the speaker's concern, half funny, half pathetic, conveys this
determination quite successfully on its own. The woman's self-pity, as is not uncommon in the blues, is both desperate and exhibitionistic, and the final pout shows her
thoughts already turning back to a world she doesn't really expect to be leaving. Folk
blues do not as a rule rise to a climactic ending, even in performance. Often the lack
of closure accomplishes exactly what it does in "Midwinter Blues": it leaves one
feeling that the end of the song is not the end of the singer.
But Hughes's unclosed endings serve a further purpose: they tend to run his blues
poems together, building them into a larger mechanism. Hughes's natural attraction
to closure is demonstrated by the neatly recapitulative endings of many of the lyrics
in The WearyBlues;by the time he wrote the impressive blues poetry of Fine Clothes to
the Jew, he seems to have learned the value of avoiding closure. Understanding the
dialogical flow of the blues poems into each other is important as a corrective to the
charge that Hughes strove too hard to make his blues poems "generally representative" of an idealized African-American commonfolk (Tracy, "Tune" 79). Each poem's
lack of finality suggests that it be read not as conclusive or representative, but as one
piece in a montage portrait of the African-American proletariat. Hughes would later
develop this principle still further in Montageof a DreamDeferred,where the poems are
explicitly worked into a sequence.
Like many other genres of folk song, the blues use formulaic phrases and images
freely. Phrases like "Going down the road," "I had a dream last night," and "I'm
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laughing to keep from crying" are an important part of the blues idiom and accordingly find their way into Hughes's blues poems. There are idiomatic imagesin Hughes
as well: the knife that avenges infidelity, the river that is the lethal last resort of the
unhappy, the railroad that both proffers escape and threatens desertion. But Hughes
frequently gives these traditional elements a new twist, turning them to his own
purposes.
For example, Hughes's "Hard Daddy" ends with a stanza that develops a common
folk motif in which an unrequited lover, usually a woman, imagines herself as a bird.
Tracy cites a verse from bluesman Peg Leg Howell:
If I had wings like
Noah's turtle dove
If I had wings like
Noah's turtle dove
If I had wings like
Noah's turtle dove
I would rise and fly and
Light on the one I love. ("Tune" 82)
Hughes effects a remarkable transformation in this formula:
I wish I had wings to
Fly like de eagle flies.
Wish I had wings to
Fly like de eagle flies.
I'd fly on ma man an'
I'd scratch out both his eyes. (Fine Clothes 86)
The traditional "If I had wings" formula normally communicates resignation or a
mild revenge-wish (e.g., "I'd fly away to my true lover, / And all he asked I would
deny"); the vicious spin that Hughes gives it is the more shocking in light of these
usually gentler overtones. Hughes has stripped the motif of the warmed-over English
poetics still visible in Howell's version ("turtle dove," "rise and fly," "light on"); at the
same time, he has sharpened the image and intensified the speaker's emotion. The
choice of the eagle (some versions of the formula have "sparrow") is brilliant: its
connotations remain open for four lines (speed? nobility? freedom?) only to become
tightly focused in the last two, where the eagle is decidedly the powerful and
terrifying bird of prey. The man's eyes-both of them-make a chillingly appropriate
target, too, hinting at castration. Hughes's reformulation stands the usual passivity of
the "If I had wings" formula on its head. He succeeds here, as he often does, in retuning blues elements without losing authenticity. For there is finally nothing more
"poetic" in his stanza than in Howell's, however much poetic control he may have
brought to bear on it.1"
In these ways, Hughes negotiates the difficult task of bringing the form and the
spirit of the folk blues into the print medium. Some poetic refinement of the form is
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inevitable in this process, and in structure, rhythm and even diction Hughes's blues
poems are more deliberately crafted than the typical folk blues. But Hughes manages
to refine his lyrics without giving them the conspicuous glaze of the vaudeville blues
composers. His blues are polished, but with no gloss added-as stones are polished,
not as wood is. The blues stanza allowed Hughes to portray the African-American
folk in a language and form that approached, perhaps to a maximal degree, their own
cultural idiom.
NOTES
1. This last phrase quotes a recurrent refrain in the blues as well as in Hughes's discussion of
them.
2. "Tune" 77-78; Langston Hughes 117-23.
3. For Hughes on his own experience of the folk blues see "Songs," "I Remember," and Big Sea
208-10.
4. See, e.g., Kent 192-202; Oliver 11; Tracy, "Tune" 73-80, 92-95, and Langston Hughes 123, 170-72.
5. Hughes himself appears to have been somewhat unsure of his position as a blues poet. "I guess
you can't call them real folkblues," he once said of his poems, "unless you want to say that I'm
a folk poet, myself a folk person, which maybe I am" (qtd. in Tracy, Langston Hughes 44).
Despite its wavering, this statement at least confirms that Hughes identified not with the
vaudeville composer but with the folk singer.
6. Such thinking, I take it, is also the basis of Harold Bloom's judgment that Hughes's poems "do
not compare adequately to the best instances of [his] cultural models" (1).
7. Oliver condemns Hughes's "Young Gal's Blues" in the same passage, though it is not clear
why, since all of his specific criticisms are directed at Brown.
8. Since Hughes's selection, invention and mixing of stanzas in his blues poems has been treated
thoroughly by Tracy (Langston Hughes 149-82; "Tune" 83-91), I do not belabor the subject here.
9. Tracy writes that "A.X. Nicholas is certainly wrong in his assertion that the blues are sung in
iambic pentameter lines" (Langston Hughes 127 n. 71). I am suggesting not that blues are sung
in iambic pentameter but that they tend toward iambic pentameter. Dickson hears the meter as
I do (30). Wagner, who writes that "Each line [in the blues] has four stresses" (33), is simply
mistaken.
10. The most confusing metrical departures often come at the very beginning of a line, where
several "pickup notes" (as in the second example) or none at all (as in the third), may appear.
In the last example, an unaccented syllable has been omitted, as I have indicated using a
musical quarter-rest. The examples cited are the first lines of the following blues: "T.B. Blues"
(Ledbetter); "St. Louis Blues" (Handy 82-83); "See See Rider" and "Good Morning Blues," both
folk standards included by Hughes and Bontemps in The Book of Negro Folklore (387-90).
11. The stanza's enjambment is again well calculated. Most poets would have broken line 5 before
an', and Hughes characteristically might have waited until after I'd; instead he foregrounds the
speaker's willful self-assertion by having her begin both of her last lines with I'd.
WORKS CITED
Bloom, Harold, ed. Langston Hughes: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1989.
Charters, Samuel. The Poetry of the Blues. New York: Avon, 1970.
Dickson, L.L. "'Keep It in the Head': Jazz Elements in Modern Black American Poetry." MELUS 10.1
(1983): 29-37.
Handy, W.C. Blues: An Anthology. 1926. New York: Da Capo, 1990.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1986.
Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Knopf, 1927.
"I Remember the Blues." Missouri Reader.Ed. F.L. Mott. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1964. 152-55.
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." Nation (3 June 1926): 692-94. Rpt. in Langston
Hughes Review 4.1 (1985): 1-4.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1970.
Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf, 1942.

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'
.Songs Called the Blues." The Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller, 1958. 159-61.
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and Arna Bontemps, eds. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, 1958.
Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976.
Kent, George E. "Langston Hughes and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition." Langston
Hughes: Black Genius. Ed. Therman B. O'Daniel. New York: Morrow, 1971. 183-210.
Ledbetter, Huddie. The Midnight Special. RCA-Vintage, LPV-505, 1964.
Oliver, Paul. "Can't Even Write: The Blues and Ethnic Literature." MELUS 10.1 (1983): 7-14.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902-1941. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986.
Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
"To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes's
Blues Poems." MELUS 8.3 (1981): 73-98.
Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Trans. Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1973.
Waldron, Edward E. "The Blues Poetry of Langston Hughes." Negro American Literary Forum 5 (1971):
140-49.
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