Langston Hughes was one of the first black men to express the spirit of blues
and jazz into words. An African American Hughes became a well known poet,
novelist, journalist, and playwright. Because his father emigrated to Mexico and
his mother was often away, Hughes was brought up in Lawrence, Kansas, by his
grandmother Mary Langston. Her second husband (Hughes's grandfather) was a
fierce abolitionist. She helped Hughes to see the cause of social justice. As a
lonely child Hughes turned to reading and writing, publishing his first poems
while in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1921 he entered Columbia University,
but left after an unhappy year. Even as he worked as a delivery man, a messmate
on ships to Africa and Europe, a busboy, and a dishwasher, his poetry appeared
regularly in such magazines as The Crisis (NAACP) and Opportunity (National
Urban League).1 As a poet, Hughes was the first person to combine the
traditional poetry with black artistic forms, especially blues and jazz. As a
leader in the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties Hughes became the
movements best known poet. He published two poetry collections, The Weary Blues
(1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).2 Mainly because of the depression
Hughes became a socialist in the 1930s. He never joined the Communist party, but
he wrote many radical poems and essays in magazines like New Masses and
International Literature and spent a year in the Soviet Union. In 1939 Hughes
moved away from the political scene. During the war he supported the Allies with
patriotic songs and sketches and published a collection of poems Shakespeare in
Harlem (1942). He attacked segregation, especially in his column in the black
weekly Chicago Defender, where he created a comic but keen black urban Every
man, Jesse B. Semple.3 In 1947, as lyricist with Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice on
the Broadway opera Street Scene, Hughes received great success. Hughes bought a
house in Harlem, where he spent the rest of his life. Hughes still feared for
the future of urban blacks. His point of view became immense and included
another book of poetry, almost a dozen children's books, several opera libretti,
four books translated from French and Spanish, two collections of stories,
another novel, a history of the NAACP and another volume of autobiography, I
Wonder As I Wander (1956). He also continued his work in the theater, pioneering
in the gospel musical play. Blues began in the south and slowly made its way
into the great cities of the North. As the great migration began people took
what they knew in south to the north. This included music. Langston Hughes
living in Harlem was caught up in the new rhythm of music and based many of his
poems on it. As a boy he remembers hearing the blues perfomed in Kansas City.
“Hughes was fascinated with black music, tried his hand at writing lyrics, and
was taken with the possibilities of performing music and poetry together” 4
“Besides having both a love of this music and the common black folk it was
created by and for, one of the reasons that Hughes began to draw on the blues
tradition for writing his poetry is that he hoped to capitalize on the blues
craze.” 5Though the markets for music and poetry were quite different, he
thought he could somehow merge the two. “Hughes was a major figure in the
Harlem Renaissance. He borrowed extensively from blues and Jazz in his work, and
in doing so, set the foundations for a new tradition of black literacy
influences by Black music.”6 Langston Hughes employed the structures, rhythms,
themes and words of the blues that he heard in the country, the city, the field,
the alley and the stage. When he used the musical and stanzaic structures of the
blues to write his poetry he most often relied on the twelve-bar blues which is
the widely used structure. These are often called blues in the classic form and
about half of his blues poems fit this structure. “I tried to write poems like
the songs they sang on seventh street”7 In 1926 Hughes published his first
book of poems called The Weary Blues. This collection of poems contains many
that involve the sounds and rhythms of the blues. The first poem in the
collection is called “The Weary Blues”. The title of the poem basically
tells the reader what the poem is all about. The description in the poem is very
well. It almost feels like you are watching this man playing blues on his piano.
The poem contains refrain in may of its stanzas. Although the refrain in this
poem changes throughout, many words are repeated atleast twice. For example,
“By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway he did a lazy
sway To the tune of those weary blues”11 .In this beautiful poem, Hughes
delineates a distance between the narrator of a poem and the blues man playing
as if to make known to the world the distance between the poet and “his
people”. Not having been born in the South or having relations who were
slaves, Hughes often considered himself an outsider when writing about slave
experiences. He was a poet who was not exactly Rooted in the experience”. 8
Poems like “The Weary Bluest are most successful because they transcend the
absence of actual music by capturing the spirit of the blues song in its cadence
of lines, and extend the limits of oral tradition by changing or modifying the
existing structures or themes of the blues. The range of Langston Hughes’s
knowledge of the blues tradition and his attempts to utilize aspects of the oral
blues tradition in his work demonstrate his creative genius in recognizing the
blues as a truly great folk art itself.9 The poem As I grew older is concerned
with growing up. It explains how as a child a person may have many dreams. But
as they get older certain things get in the way of those dreams. In this poem it
is the color of the dreamers skin that interferes and casts a shadow on his
dream. The poem also depends on an interplay between brightness and darkness.
This is used to symbolize the subjects that interfere between a dream the
speaker has. Hughes also used Metaphors in this poem. For instance when he
implies about the wall. This wall is like the problems that come between someone
and there dream. As the speaker begins to break through the wall he is cast apon
with rays of light. So the poem is implying that you should not let anything get
in the way of your dreams. One of Hughes most famous and one of his first poems
is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. The poem is a virtual thirteen lines of the
history of African people. The rhythmic chant of the line, "I've known
rivers", serves to emphasize the worldly experience Hughes felt was
embodied in the soul of every African-American. Lines five through eight are a
miniature primer on the high points of African history, "I bathed in the
Euphrates . . . I built my hut near the Congo . . . I looked upon the Nile and
raised the pyramids . . ." The three line gap following these lines is
Hughes' representation of the void left in the history of his people by the
spectrum of slavery.10 The Poem “Harlem Night Club” tells the story of how
when together in the night clubs in Harlem blacks and whites get along. They
dance together and sing together but as tomorrow comes no one knows what paths
they will go. It is as if the night acts as a disguise. It hides the color of
the skin. And when tomorrow comes with the bright sun revealing the true person
they shy away from each other because their identity has been revealed. Both
Blacks and Whites have enjoyed Langston Hughes poetry for many years. Not only
did was he the first man to express the rhythm of blues in to words but he told
the story of how it was to be a black person in his time. He used his Poetry in
sense to speak out against racism.

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American Literature. Chicago: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980 Langston
Hughes. We Too Sing America. G. Casey Cassidy.Online. Yale New Haven Teachers
Institute. 1998
Langston Hughes. The Influence of Musical Folk Traditions in the Poetry of
Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guill. Kathryn Gray.online. Yale New Haven Teachers
Institute.1998
Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes.online. Biography Online.1997
Langston Hughes.Hughes Life and Career .Arnold Rampersad.online. Oxford
University Press. 1997
The New Modern American and British Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1939