In the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, there is a long discussion of vernacular, The Vernacular Tradition, and how it impacts the meaning and our understanding of the meaning in African American literature, particularly the blues. The article begins with, “In African American literature, the vernacular refers to the church songs, blues, ballads, sermons, stories, and, in our own era, rap songs that are part of the oral, not primarily the literate (or written—down) tradition of black expression.” It can be to some extent controversial, because it excludes current vernacular of the poet. In all cultures there is formal language and the language of the street. We live in a world of linguistic jargon, each form of which is particular to a certain group of users. Academia has its “vernacular” as does every other identifiable group within the English speaking culture. This is probably true of foreign cultures, but these need not concern us here. The poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes contains certain vernaculars; the analysis of the parts of the poem which contain vernaculars shows that they add the poem characteristic traits of African-American poetry.
To begin with, an aware reader with an ear for voice can distinguish the two voices within the poem. It begins with the vernacular of Langston Hughes, tempered by his education but native to his black American origins. The street language of his youth mixes with the street language of his contemporaries and the language of his academic peers. The first five lines of this poem are examples of this vernacular. Then lines 6-8 switch to the vernacular of the blues singer. The two voices are distinctly different, but they are so intertwined that a casual read will miss the changes. Lines 9 and 10 switch back to the poet, and then back to the blues player on line 11. The rest of the poem follows this pattern with the academic voice slowly disappearing as the poet is caught up in the emotion of the blues singer and speaks in the vernacular of the streets of his time.
The poet recovers his composure and moves back into a more sophisticated vernacular as the educated Langston Hughes, poet, speaks, but when he returns to what the blues singer was singing he is once again caught up in the blues singer’s emotional plea, “I got the Weary Blues/…” Line 30 is almost a combination of the two voices, “and I wish that I had died/”. This language, using the conjunction “that” plus the use of “had” instead of using “I wish I’d a died” or “I wish I done died”, which from my experience, would have been more true of the vernacular of the blues singer, shows the poet’s inability to totally remove himself from the world of the singer, and his inability to totally enter the world in which he lives.
Finally, in line 13 Hughes uses the word “raggy” which is not an actual word. This word may be interpreted as the combination of two other words, namely, “raggedly”, which means worn out or tattered, and “ragtime” which is a style of jazz piano music having a two-four rhythm base and a syncopated melody. It is also possible that this word expresses the idea of patchwork (material which can be constructed out of scraps of rags sewn together). Therefore “raggy tune” maybe interpreted as a melody laboriously created by the composer, which is an allusion to the life of African-American people in1923 (when the poem was written). The lines “He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. / Sweet Blues! /Coming from a black man’s soul. / O Blues!” (13-16) underlines the poem’s connection with jazz music and adds it rhythm characteristic for African American music of that period.
This poem is not just about the pain of the blues singer, but even more it is about the pain and “lostness” of the poet who is listening and experiencing the music of the blues singer and passing that experience on to us. He demonstrates this as he subtly mixes the vernacular of the blues singer subject of the poem with his own cultural vernacular of the streets where he lives and the more formal vernacular of his academic education. Langston Hughes was caught between eras, between cultures and this poem captures his experience of his own traditional cultural art, as tempered by his different education and status yet totally immersed within his psyche, because it echoes the streets where he lived. The article supplies information which increases the understanding of the poem, but the poem, itself, conveys the emotional depth of his feeling.
- This poem is not just about the pain of the blues singer, but even more it is about the pain and “lostness” of the poet who is listening and experiencing the music of the blues singer and passing that experience on to us.
- Langston Hughes was caught between eras, between cultures and this poem captures his experience of his own traditional cultural art, as tempered by his different education and status yet totally immersed within his psyche, because it echoes the streets where he lived.
- In reading the article written by Hughes, My America (1943), we can see the distinctly different voice from those used in the poem, though this voice shows in the lines mentioned.
- The article supplies information which increases the understanding of the poem, but the poem, itself, conveys the emotional depth of his feeling.
References
Hughes, Langston, 1925, The Weary Blues, The Norton Introduction to Literature, eds. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter and Kelly J. Mays, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “The Vernacular Tradition.”