Literacy and Authenticity Hughes

8/10/2019 Literacy and Authenticity Hughes

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Literacy and Authenticity: The Blues Poems of Langston HughesAuthor(s): David ChinitzSource: Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1996), pp. 177-192Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299349 .Accessed: 02/12/2014 11:42

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LITERACY AND AUTHENTICITYThe Blues Poems of Langston Hughes

by David Chinitz

While the adaptation of oral culture to literary ends is never uncomplicated, theaccommodation of blues to poetry presents particular difficulties. "Blues," writes folkmusicologist Paul Oliver, "is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands upparticularly well when written down" (8). A poet who wants to write blues can avoidthis trap by poeticizing the form-but this is only to fall into another trap, for bluesmade literary read not like refined folk song but like bad poetry. For Oliver, there isno safe passage between this Scylla and Charybdis: the poetry of the blues eludes theself-conscious imitator inevitably (9-14). We need not concur with the absoluteness ofthis judgment to appreciate its force.

Langston Hughes was the first writer to grapple with the inherent difficulties ofblues poetry, and he succeeded-not always, but often-in producing poems thatmanage to capture the quality of genuine blues in performance while remaining

effective as poems. This essay will show how in inventing blues poetry Hughes solvedthe two closely related problems I have sketched: first, how to write blues lyrics insuch a way that they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the bluesform 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: "Theblues poem . .. is one that, regardless of form, utilizes the themes, motifs, language,and imagery common to popular blues literature" (44). Such a definition usefullystresses how pervasively the blues influence Hughes's art; in fact, Jemie is quitewilling to classify much of Hughes's prose as blues poetry. For the purposes of thisessay, however, I am considering the category of blues poetry to include those lyricsthat make use of blues imagery, formulae and rhythms, as well as a stanza that is atleast closely related to the normative blues form. This reasonably narrow definitionmakes systematic analysis of Hughes's blues poems fruitful, for within this class ofpoems a certain consistency of technique can be identified.

Blues use a number of stanzaic forms, but the three-line "AAB" stanza is soubiquitous as to have become the standard from which all others are seen as deviating.

Callaloo 19.1 (1996) 177-192

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This form is generated by a single line which is first repeated, often with minorimpromptu 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 andBontemps 395)

The second and third lines are often referred to as the repeat ine and the response ine.(In Hughes's poetry, each line is halved so that the stanza is rendered in six lines ratherthan three; lines 3-4, in this case, function together as repeat lines and lines 5-6 asresponse 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 delayingthe resolution.

Hughes was attracted to the blues particularly by what the music represented tohim: an expression of the resilience and tragedy of the African-American lower class.To some extent Hughes romanticized this social group, with which he alwaysidentified but to which he himself never really belonged. What Hughes called "justplain folks" are, in his portraiture, never merely "plain": they are sensitive, passion-ate, and frequently wise, drawing unconvoluted wisdom from their very lack ofsophistication. Most significantly, Hughes's black proletariat is endowed with aninexhaustible energy that veils and relieves its suffering. It is this quality that isexpressed with particular clarity in both jazz and the blues:

For sad as Blues may be, there's almost always something hu-morous about them-even if it's the kind of humor that laughs tokeep from crying.' ("Songs" 160)

Hughes's explanation for this coincidence of opposing emotions was straightfor-ward: the disenfranchisement of the African-American masses and the variousfrustrations it engendered demanded indirect outlets supplied by the subculture. The

blues were "sad songs" because they manifested the "hopeless weariness" of anoppressed people; they were "gay songs because you had to be gay or die' (Big Sea209). Hughes sought to catch this "blues spirit"-this compensatory expression ofconflicting 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 genresoften referred to as "folk blues" and "classic blues"-a classification that points todifferences 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 arecomparatively self-conscious, structurally complex, and carefully packaged, a stagesophistication of the original folk product. Popularized by great singers like Ma

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Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, the "vaudeville blues," as they are also called, wonover many of the early blues admirers among the intelligentsia. Folklorists, however,including Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling Brown, have often rejected the classicblues as mercenary and inauthentic. Hughes did not share in this condemnation; onthe contrary, as Steven Tracy has shown, when Hughes discusses the blues with anyspecificity, he seems almost always to have the classic blues in mind.2 Though Hugheswas intimately familiar with the folk blues, as a northern urbanite his access to themusic flowed naturally through commercial channels.3 Ever catholic in his tastes, heevidently thought of classic blues singers as products of the same folk culture and didnot object to their merging of blues with popular song.

That Hughes writes his best blues poetry when he tries least to imitate the folkblues is a critical commonplace.4 So seen, Hughes is too self-conscious, too deter-

mined to romanticize the African-American proletariat, too intent on reproducingwhat he takes to be the quaint humor and naive simplicity of the folk blues to writesuccessfully in that vein. Tracy argues that in extending the blues into another artform, Hughes actually identifies with the professional blues composer, throughwhose influence his own blues are "limited in expression" ("Tune" 73). Like thecommercial songwriter, Hughes is determined to write lyrics more like the blues thanthe blues themselves.

This critical consensus needs to be challenged, for Hughes's blues poems-including his best in the genre-are in fact considerably closer stylistically to the folkblues than to the deliberately cultivated classic blues. It is true that Hughes empha-sizes his own reading of the blues, using the form to reinforce a particular construc-tion of the African-American character. But he conveys his perceptions as a folk artistshould: through an accumulation of details over the entire span of his blues oeuvre,rather than by overloading each poem with quaintness and naivete. The differencesbetween Hughes's lyrics and the folk blues are better explained by the exigencies ofwriting blues for the printed page than by an identification on Hughes's part with thecommercial lyricist. And these differences are not inevitably to Hughes's disadvan-tage: they are just differences.

Hughes's "Young Gal's Blues" will serve to illustrate the relationship between hispoetry 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 someBody'll have to walk behind me.

I'm goin' to de po' houseTo see ma old Aunt Clew.Goin' to de po' houseTo see ma old Aunt Clew.

When I'm old an' uglyI'll want to see somebody, too.

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De po' house is lonelyAn' de grave is cold.

0, de po' house is lonely,De graveyard grave is cold.But I'd rather be dead thanTo be ugly an' old.

When love is gone whatCan 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 theJew, the 1927 collection in which Hughes essentially originated blues poetry, falldeliberately within the "range of utterance of common black folk" (141). This surelyapplies 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 hisordinary lyric poetry. But how folkish is the voice we hear in this poem? Spellings likepo' and de point up the speaker's dialectical pronunciation, yet her grammar isstandard. Her stanzas cohere, too, with a logic that would be remarkable in animprovised folk composition, where the verses generally relate to each other notthrough 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, polishedpoem, he could have ended "Young Gal's Blues" with the third stanza, which resolvesthe opposition set up by its predecessors with a satisfying finality. Instead, Hughessacrifices what would have been a most un-folkish tidiness by having the girl stepoutside the apparent parameters of the poem to elaborate on her fear of loneliness. Thestructural superfluity of the fourth stanza, in other words, is functional.

One of the challenges facing the blues poet is the portrayal of character in theabsence 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 andAunt Clew have put her in mind of her own future, and not, of course, vice versa. Theintrusive frankness of the phrase "old an' ugly" in a verse that describes the girl'skindness to her aunt, the decisive conclusion of the third stanza, and the struggleagainst melancholy in the last all contribute to a quick and effective delineation of thegirl's character and frame of mind. Her turns of thought are fresh and sometimessurprising, but their development is well controlled by the poet. Without callingundue attention to the poet's craft, for instance, the first two stanzas delicately createthe dilemma that is resolved in the third. The girl seems to be depicting two similarsituations when she is actually setting up an opposition between contrasting evils. Yetthe inverted chronological sequence-death in the first stanza, old age in the second-implies that the speaker is not sketching a narrative of her future; she does not expect

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to grow old and die, but to choose one fate or the other. Hughes thus maintains theillusion of an inconsequential folk-blues logic, while the structural grammar of thepoem takes the place of the performing personality that a blues audience normally hasbefore it.

To see what Hughes's blues poetry might have been like if he had truly adopted thevaudeville 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 lipsSweet as red roses.

Ma Beale street Mamma some charmer,Ma sweet Golden Brown.

Watch your man-understand?All the men's ravin'.Better see 'mediatelyThat he's behavin'.Man in the moon in a swoonFell for this Golden Brown. (Handy 91)

Hughes might well have invoked the sharp distinction he made between his poetryand his verse in the case of this commercial-style blues (Big Sea 53). The continualinternal rhyme is alien to the folk blues, which, as improvisations, tend to eschewcomplex prosody. The images and allusions are, likewise, uncharacteristic of thetraditional 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" modulatesinto standard AAB form, the lyrics remain slicker than Hughes's blues poems everget, 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 poemsin Fine Clothes to the Jew (Rampersad 160). Clearly Hughes could write vaudevilleblues 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 remaineddistant cousins.5

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0

II

The success of Hughes's blues poems depends on a self-concealing art. Art theremust be if his lyrics are to "stand up well when written down," yet the art must notbe too visible if the poems are to preserve any semblance of authenticity. It is aprecarious balance. To imitate the published lyrics of the music industry would notdo, as "Golden Brown Blues" makes clear. But to replicate the rough verses of the folksingers would not suffice to convey, in print, the feeling of their blues. The stylisticdevices that add excitement and emotion to blues performance cannot be captured inpoetry 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 leavestrembling on the trees,uunh.

All I need my little sweet woman, to keepmy company,uunh,my company. (qtd. in Charters 19)

It hardly needs saying that the effect of Robert Johnson's singing is not reproduced bythis transcription's faithful rendering of his moaning and repetition. The only solu-tion 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 bluespoems what can only be read as oral survivals:

Road, road, road, ORoad, road ... road ... road, roadRoad, road, road, OOn de No'thern road.These Mississippi towns ain'tFit fer a hoppin' toad. (Fine Clothes 87)

Hughes "could never carry a tune," but he did sing his blues poems to himself whilecomposing them (Big Sea 217). These final lines of his "Bound No'th Blues" transcribethe vocal patterns of that internal performance, an imaginative effort to render thelyric as an actual blues vocalist might. Of course Hughes must then depend on hisreader to reconstitute the original imagined performance, which will require thereader to have at least some experience as a blues listener; one can easily conceive thepuzzlement such a stanza as this must otherwise generate. As silent poetry, most ofthe stanza is essentially unreadable. For "Bound No'th Blues" is a blues poem, and

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relies at least as much on the conventions of the blues as on those of poetry for thecontext 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 laststanza, Hughes constructs a context for it in the poem as a whole. The opening of thefirst stanza, like that of the last, uses repetition to recreate the interminable stretch ofthe 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 somemore 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'swish for a traveling companion:

Got to find somebodyTo help me carry dis load.

I'd like to meet a good friendTo 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 thespeaker 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 thetwelve-fold repetition of "road," punctuated with two exclamations of "0," thatdominates the first four lines of the last stanza. To make the situation tolerable, thefinal response line laughs to keep from crying (Waldron 147). If Hughes relies on thereader's knowledge of an oral culture to make this ending readable, he is alsodetermined to justify it with a rigorous poetic logic.

Hughes's most common strategy for concealing his art is to work below the surfaceof a homely diction-even to exploit a deliberate verbal drabness. It is quite true, asTracy claims, that Hughes seldom rises to the "startling or breathtaking" heights oflanguage that such blues artists as Peetie Wheatstraw and Robert Johnson achieve(Langston Hughes 187-88). And it is natural for enthusiasts to adopt these most poeticof 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 withoutdrawing the sort of attack that Paul Oliver fires at a couple of arty stanzas from

Sterling Brown's "Tornado Blues" 10-11).7 To avoid poeticizing the blues, Hughes iswilling to forego certain possibilities of the form. He would rather have his bluespoems under- than overdressed.

When he is successful, however, Hughes plays off the plain language of his bluespoems to produce powerful effects. Much of his "Down and Out," for example, is apurposely flat springboard from which moments of intense desperation suddenlyleap:

Baby, if you love meHelp 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' galNobody gives a damn about. (Shakespeare 01)

The bitter excess of the last line strikes with hammer force precisely because every-thing that preceded it struck with so little. The second stanza works the same way:

De credit man's done took ma clothesAnd 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, whichbreak it into two sentences. The next two lines-unexpected, eccentric, almost incon-sequent-disrupt the poem's placid surface. The persona, to this point a cardboardcharacter, suddenly reveals herself in these two central lines as a woman desperate tolose her identity or at least to drown it in alcohol. The straightening comb introducesa 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'donly like the comb; she needs the beer (Langston Hughes 242). Almost by themselvesthese two lines render the singer three-dimensional, a pathetic and wretched figurewhere an undifferentiated character type, the down-and-out woman, had stoodmoments before.

These stanzas from "Down and Out" work by flashing moments of poignancyagainst an unimposing verbal and emotional backdrop. In the last stanza Hughesfinally underreaches, bringing the poem to a rather flaccid ending:

Oh, talk about yo' friendly friendsBein' kind to you-Yes, talk about yo' friendly friends

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Bein' kind to you-Just let yo'self git down and outAnd then see what they'll do.

This conclusion adds so little to the poem that in his Selected Poems Hughes droppedthe 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 delicatelycalculated formal devices. Hughes did, however, exercise some of the options avail-able in the print medium, both to simulate the characteristics of oral performance andto achieve certain visual and aural effects. At the simplest level, he used typography-particularly indentation and italics-to indicate changes of tempo and voice. Hughesalso employed a variety of blues stanzas, ranging from the standard AAB to longerand more elaborate structures resembling those of the classic blues.8

Like most song lyrics, blues are not metered in the traditional poetic sense. Theblues artist has, to an extraordinary degree, free reign to insert unstressed syllablesbetween the musical beats, and on the other hand to draw out a single word or syllablemelismatically 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 overapproximately two musical bars-each with four beats, the first and third accented-plus the first beat in a third bar (1 2 3 4 l 1 2 3 4 l 1); the remainder of the four-barphrase is left open for an instrumental "break," or fill. As a result, the number ofstresses in each blues line tends toward five. And since the stressed and unstressedbeats alternate, the musical phrase, without confining the blues to anything like strictmeter, 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 greaterregularity than the true folk blues, in which "O Alberta, 0 Alberta" and even"Mmmmmm" are perfectly plausible lines. This rhythmic freedom, an asset in theperformance setting, partly accounts for the failure of blues to transfer well to theprinted 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 theblues 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 loosenessof the blues, however, opens up other possibilities in compensation. In both cases theexpectation of rhyme and syntactic closure endows the form with exceptional poten-tial for ironic deflation or surprise. Certain forms of wit come naturally to poetsworking in either form; for example, the anticlimax which Pope so effectively exploitsis also common in Hughes:

I'm goin' down to de riverAn' 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 inhalf-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 breathsand 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 expecta-tions of the syntactical conclusion, paralleling a harmonic resolution in the music. Italso isolates the ensuing line so that visually, at least, it stands alone as a grammaticalunit, 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 butIt keeps me from feelin' blue. (Fine Clothes 21)

The overhanging an' links the first and second (and third and fourth) lines, strength-ening the structural parallelism of the lines and therefore the implied equationbetween the wife and the "side girl." It never occurs to the "bad man," as heenumerates his own faults, that his having both a wife and a side girl might be one ofthem; 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 lineinto a self-sufficient explanatory statement that neutralizes the professed uncertaintyof 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 bluesperformance is again half the purpose, for blues singers regularly make slight changeswhen they reiterate the first line of each verse. But again Hughes subtly exploits anoral 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 manCause 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 lickerEverywhere I go.

In the repeat lines, the persona affirms the common judgment by reasserting itwithout qualification or explanation. In fact, it now transpires that the unanimity ofpublic opinion is cause for swagger. Thrust into the role of the bad man, the speakerplays it to the hilt, concluding:

I'm so bad IDon't even want to be good.So bad, bad, bad IDon'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 fromthe outset that the man's assertion of agency is largely a matter of bravado, of puttingthe best face on a cycle that he cannot escape. The speaker must be a bad man; he nolonger has any choice but to bear out the general representation of himself. In thiscontext 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 canbe 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 thepitfalls that even Hughes could not always avoid-are evident in "Out of Work." It

begins:

I walked de streets tillDe shoes wore off my feet.I done walked de streets tillDe shoes wore off my feet.Been lookin' for a jobSo's that I could eat.

I couldn't find no jobSo 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. (Shakespeare 0-41)

The demands of narrative coherence, unincumbent upon the folk blues artist, some-times leave Hughes flat footed. In the first stanza, the lack of energy in the responselines may be an intentional irony, but the next stanza then ought to pick up thedramatic pace. Instead, six lines of drab narration follow-just a bit of plot that needsto be gotten over with. The succeeding stanza, however, is beautifully gauged:

A year and a day, Lawd,In this great big lonesome townA year and a day in thisGreat big lonesome townI might starve for a year butThat extra day would get me down.

In the last line of this ingeniously ironic stanza, the speaker affects weakness to levelan indirect criticism at the senseless policies of the bureaucracy. What gives the ironyits bite is firstly the power of understatement, secondly the sense of anticipation thatleads up to it, and finally the stanza's indirection, which disguises its target. Thedagger remains hidden until the thrust is half-way home. As in all standard-formblues poems, the anticipation is created partly by the simple regularity of the poem'srhymes and structure, which telegraph the eventual arrival of a satisfying denoue-ment, and partly by the repetition, which postpones this conclusion. The enjambmentof the word but here works to the same end by adding the expectation of a grammaticalresolution. What cloaks the dagger is chiefly the stanza's momentary shift of focusaway 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, thevariation in the repetition, which leaves in this enjambed so that "Great big lonesometown" can stand on its own, shifts the complaint from its apparent object, thepostponement of employment, to another source of misery, the town itself (LangstonHughes 149). The actual target of the terminal irony-"the extremes to which thesystem 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 ostensi-bly self-directed laughter, as though his strength would really give out precisely onthe 366th day.

Other seemingly casual artistic maneuvers have significant effects in the poem'slast 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 havethem proffered and then snatched away by the end of the line conveys the straits ofthe unemployed with a bitter wit. The addition of "I say" to the beginning of the repeatlines gives them an insistent quality, as if to force the reader to read the question assomething more than rhetorical. The word you here is meant to be taken personally-an implication that is borne out in the last lines, which urge the audience to imagineitself 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 haspassed its emotional and structural culmination-some time before this ending. Finalanticlimax is not unique to this poem, either; in fact, critic George Kent has com-plained 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 illustratesanother such design:

I'm gonna buy me a rose budAn' plant it at ma back door.Gonna buy me a rose budAnd plant it at ma back door.So when I'm dead theyWon't need no flowers from de store. (Fine Clothes 84)

This sentiment, according to Kent, "requires the voice of the blues singer to maintainintensity and to assert the toughness of spirit characteristic of the blues" (199). But theironic misdirection of the speaker's concern, half funny, half pathetic, conveys thisdetermination quite successfully on its own. The woman's self-pity, as is not uncom-mon in the blues, is both desperate and exhibitionistic, and the final pout shows herthoughts already turning back to a world she doesn't really expect to be leaving. Folkblues do not as a rule rise to a climactic ending, even in performance. Often the lackof closure accomplishes exactly what it does in "Midwinter Blues": it leaves onefeeling 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 bluespoems together, building them into a larger mechanism. Hughes's natural attraction

to closure is demonstrated by the neatly recapitulative endings of many of the lyricsin The Weary Blues; by the time he wrote the impressive blues poetry of Fine Clothes tothe Jew, he seems to have learned the value of avoiding closure. Understanding thedialogical flow of the blues poems into each other is important as a corrective to thecharge that Hughes strove too hard to make his blues poems "generally representa-tive" of an idealized African-American commonfolk (Tracy, "Tune" 79). Each poem'slack of finality suggests that it be read not as conclusive or representative, but as onepiece in a montage portrait of the African-American proletariat. Hughes would laterdevelop this principle still further in Montage of a Dream Deferred, where the poems areexplicitly worked into a sequence.

Like many other genres of folk song, the blues use formulaic phrases and imagesfreely. 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 accord-ingly find their way into Hughes's blues poems. There are idiomatic images n Hughes

as well: the knife that avenges infidelity, the river that is the lethal last resort of theunhappy, the railroad that both proffers escape and threatens desertion. But Hughesfrequently gives these traditional elements a new twist, turning them to his ownpurposes.

For example, Hughes's "Hard Daddy" ends with a stanza that develops a commonfolk 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 likeNoah's turtle dove

If I had wings likeNoah's turtle doveIf I had wings likeNoah's turtle doveI would rise and fly andLight on the one I love. ("Tune" 82)

Hughes effects a remarkable transformation in this formula:

I wish I had wings toFly like de eagle flies.Wish I had wings toFly 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 amild revenge-wish (e.g., "I'd fly away to my true lover, / And all he asked I woulddeny"); the vicious spin that Hughes gives it is the more shocking in light of theseusually gentler overtones. Hughes has stripped the motif of the warmed-over Englishpoetics 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. Thechoice of the eagle (some versions of the formula have "sparrow") is brilliant: itsconnotations remain open for four lines (speed? nobility? freedom?) only to becometightly focused in the last two, where the eagle is decidedly the powerful andterrifying bird of prey. The man's eyes-both of them-make a chillingly appropriatetarget, too, hinting at castration. Hughes's reformulation stands the usual passivity ofthe "If I had wings" formula on its head. He succeeds here, as he often does, in re-tuning 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 havebrought to bear on it.1"

In these ways, Hughes negotiates the difficult task of bringing the form and thespirit 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 bluespoems 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 bluescomposers. 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-Americanfolk in a language and form that approached, perhaps to a maximal degree, their owncultural idiom.

NOTES

1. This last phrase quotes a recurrent refrain in the blues as well as in Hughes's discussion ofthem.

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'ma 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 thevaudeville 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 "donot 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 clearwhy, 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 treatedthoroughly 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 iniambic pentameter lines" (Langston Hughes 127 n. 71). I am suggesting not that blues are sungin iambic pentameter but that they tend toward iambic pentameter. Dickson hears the meter asI do (30). Wagner, who writes that "Each line [in the blues] has four stresses" (33), is simplymistaken.

10. The most confusing metrical departures often come at the very beginning of a line, whereseveral "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 amusical 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," bothfolk 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 beforean', and Hughes characteristically might have waited until after I'd; instead he foregrounds thespeaker'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.- The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926.

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'sBlues Poems." MELUS 8.3 (1981): 73-98.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States. Trans. Kenneth Douglas. Urbana: University of IllinoisPress, 1973.

Waldron, Edward E. "The Blues Poetry of Langston Hughes." Negro American Literary Forum 5 (1971):140-49.

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