The Weary Blues (1926)

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     Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
     Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
          I heard a Negro play.
     Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
5     By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
          He did a lazy sway....
          He did a lazy sway....
     To the tune o' those Weary
     With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10     He made that poor piano moan with melody.
          O Blues!
     Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
     He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
          Sweet Blues!
15     Coming from a black man's soul.
          O Blues!
     In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
     I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-
          "Ain't got nobody in all this world,
20          Ain't got nobody but ma self.
          I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
          And put ma troubles on the shelf."
     Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
     He played a few chords then he sang some more-
25          "I got the Weary Blues
          And I can't be satisfied-
          Got the Weary Blues
          And can't be satisfied-
          I ain't happy no mo'
30          And I wish that I had died."
     And far into the night he crooned that tune.
     The stars went out and so did the moon.
     The singer stopped playing and went to bed
     While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
35     He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

Editor´s Comments

Langston Hughes was always interested in music, but he also had a wonderful ear for different kinds of language. Many poets had written poems in various kinds of ethnic or regional dialects before, but Hughes did something different: he took the dialects, and the music, into his poems in a way that makes us see them as we never have before. The Weary Blues is a good example -- it's a poem about the blues, although it's not written in a blues form. But it does contain some real blues: we hear it a few lines into the poem, when a line suddenly repeats itself, as the classic blues line does ("He did a lazy sway/ He did a lazy sway"). But this is just a hint, and we don't get to hear a real blues verse until near the end of the poem, when he quotes the singer he's listening to. And he does the same thing with language: just as we only get to hear the blues for a moment, the poem quotes language which is different, a language of the field, and the street. But that other language is only present in the poem for a moment here and a moment there: "Ain't got nobody but ma self./ I's gwine to quit ma frownin'/ And put ma troubles on the shelf." But these lines from the blues tradition are very different than the language which the speaker uses through most of the poem: "And far into the night he crooned that tune,/ The stars went out and so did the moon." These lines are written in quite standard literary English.

But what happens when the two kinds of language come together in the same poem, as they do in "The Weary Blues"? Well, one thing that happens is that they call attention to their difference. The speaker is not quite a part of the blues he listens to, even though he is powerfully drawn to it. He seems to be more educated, perhaps more middle class: more like the kind of person we tend to associate with poems? And yet the whole focus of the poem is on the blues lines, with their non-standard language and their musical rhythms, derived from old folk traditions. It's almost as if the speaker of the poem is discovering something, and so is the reader: there is a lot of unheard language out there; poets should listen, and make it a part of their own language.

Text History

"The Weary Blues" was first published in Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League, in 1925. It won the Opportunity prize that year as the best poem published in the magazine.

The poem was included in Hughes's first book of poems, also entitled The Weary Blues, in 1926.

The cover of the first edition of The Weary Blues, 1926.

Historical Considerations

Throughout his life, Langston Hughes addressed the question of how race and poetry ought to be related. In 1948, when he and Arna Bontemps edited an anthology to be called Poetry of the Negro, he had to grapple with the politics of race on a very pragmatic level. This series of letters, from Hughes to Bucklin Moon, his editor at Doubleday; Hughes to Louis Simpson, a young Jamaican poet Hughes wanted to anthologize; and Simpson's reply to Hughes, reveals the difficulty of deciding whether "Negro poetry" should refer to poetry about blacks (and so might be written by whites) or to poetry written exclusively by blacks. But if the latter, then what should be done with West Indian writers whose definitions of white and black might not be the same as those current in the United States?

Click here to see the letter from Hughes to Bucklin Moon.

Click here to see the letter from Hughes to Louis Simpson.

Click here to see the letter from Louis Simpson to Hughes.

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