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The Weary Blues” and “Jazztet Muted” by Langston Hughes

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The Weary Blues” and “Jazztet Muted” by Langston Hughes Department of English Putting Jazz on the Page: “The Weary Blues” and “Jazztet Muted” by Langston Hughes Ralph Hertzberg McKnight Bachelor’s degree Project Literature Fall, 2018 Supervisor: Magnus Ullén Abstract The goal of this essay is to look at the poems “The Weary Blues” and “JAZZTET MUTED” (hereafter to be referred to as “JAZZTET”) by Langston Hughes and examine their relationships to both the blues and jazz structurally, lyrically, and thematically. I examine the relationship of blues and jazz to the African-American community of Harlem, New York in the 1920’s and the 1950’s when the poems were respectively published. Integral to any understanding of what Hughes sought to accomplish by associating his poetry so closely with these music styles are the contexts, socially and politically, in which they are produced, particularly with respect to the African-American experience. I will examine Hughes’ understanding of not only the sound of the two styles of music but of what the music represents in the context of African-American history and how he combines these to effectively communicate blues and jazz to the page. Keywords: Langston Hughes; “The Weary Blues”; “JAZZTET MUTED”; the blues; jazz; Harlem; be-bop; the “Jazz-Age”; African-American history; “jazz poetry” Hertzberg McKnight 1 The poetry of Langston Hughes is inextricably linked to the new music he heard pouring out of the apartment windows and nightclub doorways of 1920s, and later, 1940s Harlem. Hughes was quick to identify the significance of this truly original art form and used it as a means to express the emotions and lived realities of the mostly African-American residents he saw on Harlem streets. For Hughes, jazz was the Negro experience made manifest, in all of its complexity, dexterity, and brashness. Jazz was music for the people, and it was not unnoticed by Hughes that, as Ted Gioia writes, “even most striking, this progressive attitude of early jazz players came from members of America’s most disempowered underclass” (200). 1 In Hughes’ 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, he says explicitly that, to him, jazz “is one of the inherent expressions of black life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” It is clear from this quote that, even in his prose, Hughes used the sounds of musical instruments (in this case a drum) as a metaphor for the Negro experience. More thoroughly, Hughes writes in prefatory note to his collection of poems MONTAGE OF A DREAM DEFERED that his poem on contemporary Harlem, like bebop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disctortions of the music of a community in transition. (387) 2 1 “Negro” was a commonly used description of African-Americans by African-Americans at the time. In Hughes’ poem “Negro” he explains what he means by the word: “I am Negro:/Black as the night is black,/Black like the depths of my Africa” (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 24). 2 The title of the collection is entirely capitalized, a tool Hughes would use in all the poems in his 1967 collection ASK YOUR MAMA 12 MOODS FOR JAZZ. Hertzberg McKnight 2 Arguably, Hughes structured his poetry to mirror what he heard in the clubs of Harlem. In effect, he was attempting to write jazz. This brings us to the question of how Hughes attempted to do this. It is important to note that Hughes’ idea of what jazz is encompassed more than just the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. “To me,” Hughes writes in his essay “Jazz as Communication”, “jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream—yet to come—and always yet—to become ultimately and finally true” (368). For Hughes, everything that came out of the blues is jazz. The emotional longing and sorrow that exemplify the blues are also foundational to jazz. And when that blues evolves into Rock and Roll, it too is jazz. “Jazz is a great big sea,” Hughes writes, “and Louis must be getting old if he thinks J.J. and Kai—and even Elvis—didn’t come out of the same sea he came out of too. Some water has chlorine in it and some doesn’t” (369). Black intellectuals like James Baldwin took issue with Hughes’ poetry in terms of the informal language he used. Much of the criticism ignores what Hughes sought to do overall with his work, which was to address the African-American experience through the language and styles of African-American music. In “Jazz as Communication”, Hughes cites a quote (probably a misquote, he says) from Louis Armstrong: “Lady, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know” (369). And, while Hughes is not so sure of that, I think that quote is spot on and that, as I will point out later, impenetrability is baked into bebop. To understand what he understood jazz to be I will explore a bit of the history of jazz and what it represented to the African-American community, as well as the political connotations inherent in the music. I will also explore some of the fundamental structures of blues and jazz. Once I have provided a bit of context for Hughes’ work, I will do a close reading of one poem from each of those two eras to examine how Hertzberg McKnight 3 successfully Hughes communicates jazz on the page. The question that I seek to address is to what extent, and to what effect, Hughes’ poetry draws on musical forms such as blues and jazz. Early Jazz Many historians trace the origins of jazz to a place in New Orleans known as Congo Square. When Louisiana was under French colonial rule, the French king Louis XIV issued an edict called “Code Noir” (The Black Code) laying down a set of rules for dealing with slaves in 1724. Article 2 of the Code Noir mandated that all slaves be baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. 3 A byproduct of that was that slaves were not allowed to work on Sundays. Because the code also prohibited slaves of different masters from gathering, the baptized slaves gathered in out-of-the-way places such as a spot known as “la place Congo”. These gatherings involved singing, dancing, and various forms of instrumentation. A noted architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed these events as late as 1819 and made sketches of the performers. As Gioia explains, Latrobe “not only left a vivid written account of the event but made several sketches of the instruments used” (4). He goes on to note, “These drawings confirm that the musicians of Congo Square, circa 1819, were percussion and string instruments virtually identical to those characteristics of indigenous African music” (4). One such characteristic of the percussion elements, as Gioia notes, was that “different beats are frequently superimposed, creating powerful polyrhythms” (11). He continues, “…an African ensemble would construct layer upon layer or rhythmic patterns, forging a counterpoint 3 There were 60 articles in all, including the banishment of all Jews from French colonies and mandating that masters may chain and beat slaves but not torture or mutilate them. However, as history shows, American slave owners didn’t feel bound by Code Noir. Hertzberg McKnight 4 of time signatures, a polyphony of percussion” (11). These elements are clearly found in what would become jazz: from the quirky articulations of ragtime to free-flowing rhythm collages of be-bop. It should come as little surprise, then, that one of the earliest jazz musicians, Buddy Bolden (often credited as the originator of jazz), performed with his band at Globe Hall in New Orleans between 1900 and 1907, within eyesight of Congo Square. The origin of the blues is a bit harder to pin down yet shares its ancestry with jazz in that it can trace its roots to Africa and likely evolved from the work songs of the slaves in the ante-bellum South. In a documentary recorded for Mississippi Public Television in 1978, B.B. King (because the roots of delta blues are so hard to trace, we may as well take the word of one of its masters) traces the roots of the blues to the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. In the video he says, “A leader would call out and the workers would follow, and the work would go on and on.” He continues, “The roots of the blues are in the field holler too. The solitary song of one man alone in the fields from sunup to sundown.”4 Unlike the freewheeling, improvisational grooves of be-bop, the blues is a fairly structured art form. In a blues stanza “an initial line is stated, then repeated, and followed with a rhyming line” (Gioia 13). This is then sequenced into twelve bars with each line taking up four bars each. This twelve-bar format is punctuated by the use of what is called the “blue” note which would be both the major and minor third in the vocal line, along with the flattened seventh. However, with the earliest blues musicians that structure was more fluid with stanzas anywhere between twelve and fifteen bars. This fluidity is now a hallmark of contemporary jazz that was first stretched to its limits in the era of be-bop.
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