Remediating Jazz
An analysis of Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”
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Heleen van de Water
4020898
Bachelor Thesis English Language and Culture
Simon Cook
David Pascoe
25 June 2015
5760
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Content Page
Abstract
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Introduction
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Section 1 - Social, historic, and cultural context
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Section 2 – Jazz poetry
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Section 3 – Close reading
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Conclusion
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Works cited
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Abstract
Although much has been published about Langston Hughes and jazz poetry, few studies have
researched how exactly jazz is incorporated into poetry. By reviewing the existing research,
adding theories to this knowledge, and analysing Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” with an
interdisciplinary approach, this study will show how Hughes remediates jazz music by using
jazz-related intertext, form, and rhythm.
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Introduction
Nearly every scholar who has written on Langston Hughes, classifies him as the poet under
whose wings jazz poetry took flight. Wallenstein, for example, puts it thus: “Langston
Hughes (…) blazed the trail for jazz poets who would follow. All of his verse expresses the
influence of the American music that was growing up simultaneously with him” (603). They
agree that Hughes used African American music to write about and for his people, and a
broad consensus exists on the political and social themes that he thus put forward (Chinitz,
Domina, Ford, Komunyakaa, Lauter, Lenz, Nichols, Spillers, Wallenstein). Additionally, they
agree that Hughes, and many jazz poets after him, used rhythmic and melodic elements of
jazz in their poems. For example, in his book Jazz Poetry, Feinstein describes how a panel of
poets at a symposium states that jazz poetry must “suggest jazz in its rhythmic structure” (3),
but neither the members of the panel, nor Feinstein himself elaborate on how, exactly, this is
done. Indeed, little research has been done on how exactly these rhythmic features return in
written poetry. Although the incorporation of jazz and blues music into Hughes’ poetry is
often mentioned, its specific reflection in Hughes’ early work remains unclear. However, it is
Hughes’ early poems that were written during or shortly after the Harlem Renaissance, a
period in which specifically jazz and blues music became increasingly relevant as a means of
defining African American culture. Moreover, Hughes’ early work has helped define jazz
poetry as a form adopted by many poets after him.
Wallenstein has studied the performance practice of jazz poetry recitals, accompanied
by jazz music, and thus he looks at the poetry-music relationship more closely than many of
his colleagues. Yet, he only discusses work of the 1960s. Du Ewa Jones has provided a closereading of Hughes’ poetry with regards to music, but she, too, focusses on his later work,
written “specifically to be performed with blues and jazz accompaniment” (1150). Jemie
offers the most insight into the music – poetry relationship in his article “Jazz, Jive, and
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Jam”. However, he does not clarify how exactly this relationship manifests itself. Tracy has
explored how specific blues traditions are reflected in Hughes’ poems, but he limits his
research to the blues form only. This research will use an interdisciplinary approach to
Hughes’ early poems: by uniting literary scholarship and musicology, the following question
will be answered: How does Hughes use jazz-related intertext, form, and rhythm to remediate
music in “The Weary Blues”?
By close-reading one of Hughes’ most iconic poems, and establishing how he
recreates jazz and blues music in his work, this thesis aims to contribute to a deeper
understanding of what makes a poem a jazz poem. In order to attain this insight, a close look
must be taken at what, up until now, has defined jazz poetry as such. Firstly, a brief historic,
social, and cultural context of Hughes’ early work will be presented. The subsequent section
will review the relevant research on jazz poetry. It also aims to add to this knowledge in such
a way that will aid the analysis of Hughes’ work. Lastly, the theories will be tested by
applying them to Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues”.
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Context – The Jazz Era
Although Langston Hughes’s career as a poet extends well beyond the Harlem Renaissance,
the period, often also labelled ‘the New Negro Renaissance’, has been a very important stage
in his development (Nichols 806). After the Reconstruction Era, African Americans,
especially in Southern America, were confronted with oppression and racism. This, in
combination with work opportunities generated by World War I, caused a major move of
African Americans from the Southern states to the major cities of the North, such as Chicago,
New York, and Philadelphia (Spillers 783). However, even in the more liberal Northern
cities, African Americans did not have full civil and political rights, and as post-war America
was confronted with a large influx of immigrants, concerns about factory jobs being taken
over by minorities worsened their situation even further. The summer of 1919 was marked by
racial riots in major Northern cities, and an increase in the number of lynchings in the South
(Domina xiii). Furthermore, the African American community became increasingly
diversified through distinctions of education, class, and geographical location. A small,
educated, elite came into being, together with a growing middle class. In his essay “The New
Negro”, that would become one of the most representative works of the Harlem Renaissance,
Alain Locke speaks of the importance of urbanisation for the societal status of African
Americans (789). The development and increasing accessibility of mass media amongst
African Americans facilitated an audience, or market, for African American art and culture
that would make the New Negro Renaissance possible (Lauter 499). Harlem would become
the centre of this social and cultural movement. As Locke states: “In Harlem, Negro life is
seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is – or promises
at least to be – a race capital” (789). Indeed, in Harlem, many cultural forms of expression
would meet, from the Jazz music of Duke Ellington to the writings of Alain Dubois.
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Jazz music originated as a mixture between Western (European) popular music and “a
music created in North America created by black slaves of West African origin and their
descendants” (Cook 123). West African slaves in the American South would come into
contact with western culture, for example singing hymns at the churches of their plantation
owners. They would merge the music of their West African heritage with these western
influences, thus creating a new kind of music. Its popularity took off in New Orleans in the
early 1900s, due to a combination of different factors: the development of instruments such
as the piano, and the radio, and a “craze for social dancing” (Cook 123). Jazz, to which social
(as opposed to formal) dancing was inextricably linked, was very popular amongst people on
the periphery of society, mostly African Americans, but also youngsters who wanted to rebel
against the cultural elite. Jazz was not considered ‘high culture’ by either the white or the
African American cultural elite. As Levine states, during the turn of the century, ‘Culture’
was Eurocentric, and jazz became its antithesis. The two concepts helped define each other
through binary oppositions: jazz was untraditional, the product of a new age, accessible,
spontaneous, “interactive to the extent that the line between audience and performers was
often obscured” (7). Levine furthermore stresses the importance of realising that the
emergence of jazz as a distinct music coincided with “emergence of a hierarchized concept of
Culture with its many neat but never precisely defined adjectival boxes and categories” (7).
The ‘New Negro Intellectuals’ did not perform jazz music themselves. Instead, popular
culture could be found in for example bars, clubs, and vaudeville theatres. The artists that
played there could be considered more connected to the folk roots of African American
culture than the educated elite that formed the ‘New Negro’ writers. However, it did gain
popularity with the white middle class, who would regard African American culture as a new,
exotic, thrilling phenomenon. Even when ‘their’ form of culture, jazz, became more accepted,
African Americans remained discriminated against. Mostly white Americans received and
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were paid for air time on commercial radio, and high-end jazz venues such as for example the
famous Harlem Cotton Club were inaccessible for African Americans, with the exception of
the musicians on stage (Barlow 325-7).
The African American literary audience differed greatly from the typical white middle
class audience. It was diverse, in transition, and did not yet have a communal sense of
cultural history. This raised the question amongst the Harlem Renaissance writers how to
apply artistic forms (Lauter 499). Some writers would argue that to achieve their progressive
ideals, African American writers should conform to the latest artistic ideals, thus addressing a
larger white audience, even if that meant they would exclude many black readers who did not
have the same level of education. ‘High’ cultural expressions, free of enforced racial identity,
would bridge the gap between different ethnic backgrounds. They argued that the use of folk
material such as blues and jazz would be “advantageous or implicitly condescending” (Lauter
499). Others, however, would stress the importance of using folk material, indeed, actively
presenting themselves as African American writers, thus stating that African American
culture is of equal value to white American culture. Langston Hughes, in his essay “The New
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, pleads for the latter of the two methods, promoting
first and foremost African Americans taking pride in their own cultural heritage. About his
own way of writing he states:
Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I
know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of
jazz. (…) Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the
eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness
in a white world, (…) the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile
(812).
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Hughes himself clearly belonged to a cultural elite. He came from a relatively privileged
background. During his childhood, he immersed himself in literature. In his twenties he spent
some time in France, where he learned about Western European culture, and could view his
own culture from a distance. Hughes enjoyed at least one year of college education before he
dropped out, disappointed in formal education. When he arrived in New York, he quickly
became part of the literary circle of the “New Negro writers”, to which also writers like Zora
Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen belonged (Nichols 805-6). This created a two-fold sense
of double identity that Hughes might have faced. The first sense is that of him being at the
same time an individual, and yet always having an explicit social and political identity
(Lauter 500). In W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk this is described as follows: “It is
a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others (…). One ever feels this two-ness, - an American, a Negro, two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body (…).”
(qtd in Lauter 497).
The second form of double identity that Hughes might have faced is the friction between
what was considered ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It is clear that Hughes took much pride in his
folk heritage, that what was being considered as ‘low’ culture at his time. Yet, he himself
belonged to a cultural elite. He chose to describe this ‘low’ folk culture in terms of ‘high’
culture: poetry. He used vernacular themes and language in an art form that was generally
considered to be elitist: poetry. This merging of different art forms created what Hughes
himself described as: Jazz Poetry.
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Jazz poetry
This section aims to define what makes a poem a jazz poem, in such a way that will facilitate
the application of this definition in a close reading of Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues”.
At first glance, drawing a clear distinction between jazz lyrics and jazz poetry seems very
difficult, and possibly doing so is not necessary. Music and poetry share many elements. As
Wallenstein states, tone, rhythm, and cadence belong to both art forms. Amiri Baraka, a
famous jazz poet, observes: “Black poetry in the main, from its premise (…) means to show
its musical origins and resolve as a given. Just as Blues is, on one level, a verse form, so
Black poetry begins as music running into words” (Qtd in Wallenstein 614). Indeed, many of
Langston Hughes’ poems could very well be put to music, such as “Listen Here Blues”, or
“Ballad of the Killer Boy”. Kent even goes as far as to remark that some of Hughes’ poems
are in need of music: “Frequently, the last stanza seems to lose intensity, simply because we
do not have the ingenious use of triumphant tone that the actual blues singer is able to render”
(28). Additionally, there are many lyrics to jazz tunes able to stand on their own, without
music, because of their poetic qualities. However, with regards to this research, the following,
albeit overgeneralising, distinction is used: a lyric is text that is meant to be sung, whereas a
poem is text that is meant to be recited or read. Indeed, this clear-cut distinction surpasses
hybrid forms, such as text that was initially written as poetry, but later put to music. Yet, the
lack of such a distinction will hinder defining jazz poetry as a separate art form. In Jazz
Poetry, Feinstein provides the following definition: “A jazz poem is any poem that has been
informed by jazz music”, emphasizing that “the jazz poem should be informed by the music
itself” (2). However, no in-depth analysis of exactly how a poem is influenced by music is
given. Recreation of music in poetry can be done in various ways. This thesis distinguishes
three components: content, form and structure, and rhythm.
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Jazz and blues music have many similarities. Blues music has had its significant
influence on jazz music, and much of its musical idiom reoccurs in popular jazz standards
(Goia 14). Presently, blues is often categorised under the collective term ‘jazz’. Jemie
distinguishes the two styles in poetry thus:
Unlike classic blues, the blues poem has no fixed form: it is a species of free verse
which attempts to approximate some of the qualities of jazz. The dynamic energy of
jazz is to be contrasted with the relatively low-keyed and generally elegiac tone of the
blues. Blues is for the most part vocal and mellow, jazz for the most part instrumental
and aggressive. The jazz poem attempts to capture that instrumental vigor. […] Jazz
poetry […] moves with the bouncy rhythms and exuberance that characterize the
music (61).
Despite Jemie’s contention that blues poems do not have a fixed form, Hughes’ blues poems
typically do. As Tracy illustrates, many poems follow the structure of blues lyrics (“To The
Tune” 80-2) Furthermore, regarding the aims of this research, separating the two styles in
poetry too distinctly will not be fruitful, as many scholars have used the terms ‘jazz’ and
‘blues’ interchangeably to categorise Hughes’ poetry, and indeed many traits that are ascribed
to either one of the styles are in fact the same. Additionally, as Tracy explains, Hughes is
likely to be influenced by a wide array of African American music styles throughout his life
up until the Harlem Renaissance, and arguably he used all of these idioms in his poetry (“To
The Tune” 74).
Of the three mentioned components, jazz-inspired intertextuality, such as the use of
themes, allusions to performers, songs, venues, or performing practices, is most apparent.
Allusions can be made both explicitly and implicitly. An implicit allusion would for example
be words denoting certain sound qualities that are connected to jazz. Additionally, the style of
language can be taken into account. Hughes himself states about his style of language:
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Since much of my work is concerned with Negro life, I seek to employ colloquial
Negro speech as used in some stratas of colored life, but not in the educated classes,
as simply as I can without distorted spelling, relying rather on the idiom and turn of
phrase for the flavor. I feel, in a sense, that the function of the poet is not only to
interpret his own people to the rest of the world, but to themselves (Qtd in Tracy 41).
Jemie remarks about the use of language that it is “swift-paced, informal talk [and] aids the
impression of spontaneity. The language is most often colloquial, sometimes the hip talk of
the musicians, almost always the language of the common people, rarely the language of the
academics” (61). Wallenstein, furthermore, points out that jazz talk, also described as raps,
often uses coded language, words used as ‘covers’ for subjects such as sex, drugs, anger, and
sorrow. Neil Leonard states that “jazz talk has been highly eclectic, combining Black English
with the jargons of gambling, prostitution, larceny, music, and dance” (qtd in Wallenstein
599). Jazz music in the 1920s cannot be regarded separately from its social and political
context, and thus often issues of race and inequality are communicated. However, as Jemie
argues, this is done in a highly personal way, using “Images [that] are sensory, domestic,
earthy, like blues images” (77).
To be able to fully grasp how the form of jazz poetry is musically influenced, some
general notions need to be explained. When a jazz or blues song is being referred to, only its
chord progression and melody are signified, not any possible solos. This scheme is played
before and after (instrumental) solos, which follow this structure as well. Most blues songs
consist of twelve bars, divided over three lines of four bars each. The lyrics of a blues song
naturally follow this structure, thus, the most commonly cited blues lyric rhyme scheme is
AAB, “where a lyric is sung (A), then repeated (A), then a rhyming lyric is given (B)”
(Komara 110). Jazz standards generally consist of 32 bars, divided over four parts of eight
bars each. However, this structure does not seem to be often reflected in poetry. Like in jazz
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music, patterns of themes and variations can be discerned. In jazz music, the theme of a song
is used as a framework for improvisations that break away from the original structure.
Wallenstein argues that likewise, in jazz poetry, “the range of improvisator gesture is
immense” (595). Improvisation can reflect in free verse poetry, but also in repetition on a
smaller level. Repetition is often used in jazz improvisation, to achieve continuity, and to
highlight variations (Feinstein 49). This is best exemplified by Jemie’s close reading of
Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama”:
IN THE
IN THE QUARTER
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES
SINGERS
SINGERS LIKE OSINGERS LIKE ODETTA – AND THAT STATUE
“The musician/poet returns again and again to the mother-note, reaches back again
and again to that vast source of the music’s energy, and pulls, each time dragging out
a larger chunk of that energy, and in the process driving his audience into ecstasy
(…). The jazz instrumentalist [has a] predilection for picking a note or phrase and
playing with it, repeating it over and over and weaving it into changes on a theme,
thereby creating unexpected intensities (…)” (80).
In addition to the formal structure of a poem, another factor that can be taken into account
when exploring form and structure of jazz (and blues) poetry, is orthography: the way a poem
looks on the page. In Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose, Short calls the use
of visual effects on the page ‘graphological foregrounding’ (54-57). The use of capitalisation,
punctuation marks, and the length of lines or enjambment can help recreate sound effects that
imitate jazz and blues music. For example, indentation of lines could create a pause, adding
weight to the line similarly to the way a jazz musician would pause before making a musical
statement. Contrarily, run-on lines might have the effect of long musical lines of subsequent
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short notes, speeding up the poem. Another example of using graphological foregrounding is
given in “Ask Your Mama”. The capitalisation of the fragment conveys a loud volume; in
this case, it resembles the sound of a jazz soloist at the height of his or her solo.
The third and last component of musical recreation in poetry is arguably the most
difficult to analyse: rhythm. Nearly every text that
discusses Hughes’ work, mentions its jazz-influenced
rhythm. However, none state in what way the poetry is
Figure 1
influenced, nor explain what makes the rhythm of African
American music unique. The term ‘syncopation’ is often used,
yet never explained. In music, if a part of a measure (temporal
Figure 3
segment) that is usually unstressed is accented, the rhythm is
considered to be syncopated (Bernward and Saker 14). A
measure, or bar, is mostly divided into four beats, as is
shown in figure 1. Every beat is assigned a relative
Figure 3
weight, as is illustrated in figure two. Each beat, or quarter
note, can be subdivided into eighth notes, as shown in figure 3.
As is described in Music in Theory and Practice, in jazz music,
Figure 3
the “division of the beats is uneven and there is considerable
stress on the notes between beats” (393). Simplified, this means that of each two eighth notes,
the first one is longer than the second one, although the second one is more heavily stressed.
Furthermore, the use of triplets is important in both jazz and blues music. A triplet is the
division of a beat into three, instead of two sub beats. Often, the last beat of each triplet
receives the most stress. If syncopation is indeed the most important trait of jazz rhythm, its
embodiment in language revolves around stress reversal. This could be achieved in various
ways: firstly, the reversal of traditional metre. However, as Hughes’ poems are known to use
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colloquial language, it seems unlikely that he pours this into traditional metric forms such as
the iambic pentameter. Another way of achieving syncopation is by varying in syllable
length, for example placing a long syllable after a series of short syllables.
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The Weary Blues
One of Hughes’ most well-known and influential poems is The Weary Blues. It is one of the
first published poems that recreates a blues performance (Hughes and Wall iii). The poem
describes a scene in which the speaker hears a working class man in Harlem, playing the
piano, just having come home late at night after a long day’s work (Hughes “The Weary
Blues Wide”). The poem is brimming with allusions to African American culture. The start of
the poem, ‘Droning a drowsy syncopated tune / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon / I
heard a Negro play’ (1-3), is ambiguous about who the first two lines describe: the speaker of
the poem, or the piano player. This illustrates a sense of double identity: the speaker
describes an event he witnessed as an outsider, but at the same time gives the impression that
he is very much part of that event, much like Hughes himself was both a part of African
American folk culture, yet, having a relatively privileged background, an outsider to the ‘low’
forms of culture to which jazz music certainly belonged. This is further exemplified by the
lines ‘The singer stopped playing and went to bed / While the Weary Blues echoed through
his head’ (33-34). The speaker, who up until that point has presented himself as a witness to a
scene, suddenly appears to know what the singer experiences when he is alone. The second
instance of double identity can be found in the lines ‘With his ebony hands on each ivory key
/ He made that poor piano moan with melody’ (9-10). The juxtaposition of ebony hands on
ivory keys shows how ‘black culture’ appropriates a ‘white’ form of cultural expression, just
as Hughes used poetry, a form of ‘high culture’, to recreate ‘low culture’. The recreating of
jazz music and culture in The Weary Blues takes place on many levels. As stated, this
research will look at three components: content, form, and rhythm.
The content of the poem contains many direct allusions to music. According to Tracy,
the song to which the title refers is likely to be based on the 1928 song "Texas Worried
Blues", recorded by Henry Thomas. Hughes states that he used the first blues song he heard
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as an inspiration for the poem (“To The Tune” 74). Clearly the setting of the poem is related
to music, and thus many musical terms are used to create an atmosphere. The first lines start
off with describing music. ‘Droning’ and ‘drowsy’ are onomatopoeic: the ‘oh’ sounds slow
the poem down, adding to the drowsy feel of a late night musical session, further illustrated
by the ‘pale dull pallor of an old gas light’ in line 5. Another particularly striking example of
recreating music in the poem’s content can be found in lines 23 and 24, where a typical
custom in blues music is described: the playing of a set of chords before singing the melody1.
Furthermore, the ‘sad raggy tune’ in line 13 could refer to the song being ragged, unpolished,
but the word ‘raggy’ also evokes the connotation with ragtime, a style of jazz music
particularly known for its use of syncopation. The style of language used in the poem is
undoubtedly colloquial. The vocabulary that is used, as well as for example the contraction in
line 8, gives the impression that the language of the poem resembles the way an average
person in Harlem would speak. However, when the singer is directly quoted, when he sings
the blues in lines 19-22 and 25-29, the language becomes more vernacular, resembling a type
of dialect: ‘ma self’ instead of myself, ‘gwine’ instead of the ‘gonna’ or ‘going to’, ‘I ain’t
happy no mo’ instead of ‘no more’. The singer is emphasised to be African American, as he
is referred to by ‘Negro’ in lines 3 and 18, and ‘black man’ in line 15. This underlines the
embedding of jazz music into African American culture.
The form of the poem contains direct representations of the blues form: lines 19-22
and 25-29. As Tracy has analysed, Hughes ‘shows a strong ability to capture the beat and
phrasing of blues songs’ (“To The Tune” 81) here. However, he does not analyse as
thoroughly the parts of the poem in which the speaker takes on a narrative role. He states that
‘the repeated use of rhymed couplets separated by refrains (…) lends heightened
dramatization to the words after the manner of the vaudeville blues singers, and phrases like
1
For a musical example of this practice, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IOou6qN1o
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“mellow croon” and “crooned that tune” evoke a vaudeville-stage aura (…) (“To The Tune
90). Tracy makes a distinction between the ‘pure loosely arranged, spontaneous early blues’,
that in this poem is represented by the lines of the singer, and the ‘more arranged and
sophisticated’ blues that was popular during the Harlem Renaissance (“To The Tune” 75-6).
However, there are many musical elements in the narrative part of the poem that Tracy does
not point out. Firstly, Hughes uses much repetition in his poem. Lines 1-8 can be read as a
musical phrase: The theme is lines 1-3, which is repeated in lines 4-6, after which the
repetition of ‘He did a lazy sway….’ Builds up to a climax which is resolved and concluded
by ‘To the tune o’ those Weary Blues’ (8), much like a jazz soloist would build up a phrase.
The theme, which consists of two longer lines, of ten to twelve syllables each, followed by a
shorter line of two to six syllables, continues in lines 9 to 16. The interjections that are made
in lines 11, 14, and 16 resemble how an audience would respond during a jazz performance.
This is further illustrated by the indentation of the lines. The concluding narrative of the
poem, in lines 31-35, lacks the uneven line lengths that create the feel of a jazz phrase leading
to a climax. Instead, they lead to a denouement of the poem in content as well as form.
However, the last line leaves the ending open as it is not part of a couplet, like the content of
the line does not leave the reader with a sense of closure.
The last element in which the poem recreates jazz music that will be discussed is
rhythm. Both the information that the poem on the page provides, as well as two recordings
of Langston Hughes reciting the poem have been taken into account with making an analysis.
Throughout the poem, there are many instances of syncopation. For example, it is realised in
the endings of the first two lines:
/
x x / x / x/ x /
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune
/ x /
x / xx / x /
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon
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The lines consist of trochees and an occasional dactyl: metric feet with one or more
unstressed syllables following a stressed syllable. However, both lines end with a single long,
stressed syllable. This creates a sense of syncopation in which the downbeat, for example the
normally heavily stressed first quarter of a measure, is anticipated by the last quarter note of a
measure. In musical notation, the lines would look thus:
As illustrated, the last words of each line are syncopated as their stress does not fall on a
normally stressed beat. Lines 17 and 18 follow the same pattern. In addition to syncopation,
Hughes uses many words and parts of phrases that have a triplet feel. For example, in lines 12
and 13, the words ‘musical’ and ‘rickety’ convey this strongly. When these lines are
represented in musical notation, they look thus:
This rhythmical pattern occurs throughout the poem, for example in lines 32: ‘and so did the
moon’, and in line 35: ‘he slept like a rock’.
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Conclusion
This study set out to determine how Hughes uses jazz-related intertext, form, and rhythm to
remediate jazz in “The Weary Blues”. It has identified several ways in which Hughes
accomplishes this. Firstly, he makes extensive use of jazz-related intertextuality, both through
direct references to places and practice, as well by adopting the style of language typically
ascribed to African American culture. Furthermore, Hughes implements blues form directly
in his poem, and through repetition and development of lines he recreates the contours of a
jazz improvisation. Lastly, jazz rhythms are realised on the page by implementing
syncopation and the impression of triplets. The findings of this research add to the insights in
how a jazz music-poetry relationship can be established.
The major limitation of this study is its small scope. Both the depth of research into
the jazz music- poetry relationship, as the amount of poems analysed are too little to draw
any general conclusions. A key strength of the present study, however, is the interdisciplinary
approach of literary scholarship and musicology combined, and this might serve as a basis for
future studies on how exactly jazz music is recreated in text. A related issue that this study
did not address is: Who was the audience for whom Hughes remediated jazz? As stated,
music would have a much wider African American audience than the ‘elitist’ art form of
poetry. Combining new insights in the formal aspects of jazz poetry with a broader view on
its context and goals will add to the understanding of Hughes’ poetry, and its significance for
the coming into existence of a conscious expression of African American culture.
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