Langston Hughes The Weary Blues

Langston Hughes is one of my favorite poets, and in this poem he brings out the true emotion from the blues. As we watched in the films on Rock and Roll, Punk, and Blues, you saw the emotions that were poured out through their guitars and through the lyrics to their songs. Blues was surrounded and founded on such emotional history that music became one of the best ways for an emotional outlet. In this poem it talks about a man who was singing the blues on the street and as he swayed to the music, you felt his pain go from his body all the way into your bones. Just from reading the poem I can feel that. I was able to take myself out of the book and sit with him on the street corner as he sang his melodic blues. The man in this poem mentions that he has nothing, and at times wishes he was dead. And at the end of the poem, it says “The singer stopped playing and went to bed…he slept like a rock, or a man that’s dead” (pg. 504). I then made the connection that the only thing keeping this man’s soul alive is his music. Langston Hughes has as way of depicting such a clear image of the poem she’s telling. She brings you from the street where the man is sitting and singing, all the way to the cotton fields, singing with the slaves as they pick cotton. Singing is what kept their souls from dyeing, the same things that is keeping this man alive.