In his article “To the Tune of Those Weary Blues” Steven Tracy outlines the influences of blues music in Langston Hughes’s poetry, beginning with the poet’s youth in Lawrence, Kansas outside of Kansas City from 1902-15 and his brief period in Harlem from 1922-1923.
The blues music of Kansas, Tracy describes, can be described as “traditional” and rooted in black folk culture. These traditional “early blues” are “loosely arranged” and “spontaneous in comparison to the “more arranged and sophisticated nature” of other varieties of blues that came through Kansas City via the railroads (75).
Hughes would encounter sophisticated styles of blues more directly while in Harlem from the years 1922-23. Here “classic blues” was sung with a dramatic, “vaudeville edge” (79). Tracy suggests Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” is in essence a “classic blues” poem. He argues that “the repeated use of rhymed couplets separated by refrains…lends heightened dramatization” to the poem (90), which appropriately captures the vaudeville dramatics of a classic blues musician like the one the poem’s speaker describes. Simultaneously, Hughes draws upon the simple style of traditional blues in “Weary Blues,” employing the traditional AAA stanzaic form, used as well in the similar Henry Thomas song “Texas Worried Blues” (80).
Tracy explains Hughes’s mingling of blues influences in his poetry as a legitimization of blues music. In his article “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes, Tracy writes, “attempt[s] to impose a more sophisticated and literary scheme” to black folk art, including blues (78); by mixing the “pure” traditional blues of his youth in Kansas with the “sophisticated” classic blues, Hughes aims to refine blues music through poetry.