Langston Hughes,
New York City

I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes wrote a great deal about the genre of music known as jazz, and the blues, too.

There are a number of works in which the asscoiation is implicit with such works as Jazzonia, The Weary Blues and other poems. There are also those works which are written in the distinct style of the music.

Langston was known to frequent jazz clubs wherever he visited and expecailly enjoyed the Harlem scene. His appreciation of jazz emerges in his works as he sampled with using the distinct rhythms he heard by jazz artists and applying to the rhythm of his poetry.

One of the more blarring examples of this is present in his poem, “The Weary Blues”. This poem has a rhythm to it that is expressed by his word choice. The dialectic mixing of hard syllables and repetition of certain phrases are strategically placed so as to mimic a song. As he writes, “Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool/He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool./Sweet Blues!/Coming from a black man’s soul./Oh Blues!”. In these lines we see that he ties literal music to the performer on his stool but also completes the image with his own statement about how the music makes him feel as well.

This intertwining of musician and listener is important to the happenings in Harlem at the time. The Harlem Renaissance was as much a shared voice as it was a creative expression by individuals. The shared consciousness taps back into the notion of a shared racial consciousness. It is being tapped into and comes from the soul, the black man’s soul to be exact. Additionally, we see the way that Langston Hughes shares the limelight with jazz music. By writing about it as he has done, he has also legitimized its presence in the African-American identity.

Source: http://jazzagelitandmusic.pbworks.com/The+Weary+Blues+Langston+Hughes

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