43921799

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of
Debrecen CAHS
Enter the Blues: Jazz Poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown
Author(s): Hao Huang
Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Vol. 17, No. 1
(Spring, 2011), pp. 9-44
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921799
Accessed: 11-11-2019 00:23 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University
of Debrecen CAHS is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)
This content downloaded from 129.49.100.192 on Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:23:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Enter the Blues:
Jazz Poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown
Hao Huang
Introduction
The question "What constitutes jazz poetry?" is a prerequisite to an

academic discussion about the relationship between jazz music and ja
poetry. Is it possible to produce a coherent, consistent definition? Shou
any poetry regarding or alluding to jazz performers or music be consider
jazz poetry? Is authenticity achieved in jazz poetry only by directly referrin
to the rhythm, structures, and improvisational techniques of jazz music?
paraphrase the jazz critic Sascha Feinstein, the answer to all these questio
is a qualified yes. In Poetry : From the 1920s to the Present (1997), he define
a jazz poem as "any poem that has been informed by jazz music. Th
influence can be in the subject of the poem or in the rhythms, but on
should not necessarily exclude the other" (2). In their Preface to The Ja %
Poetry Anthology (1991), Feinstein and fellow jazz poet Yusef Komunyak
declare that jazz poetry can be understood in terms of "standard poetic
sensibilities" and the conventions of a prosody that allows for syncopate
rhythm and meter (xvii).
American poets as diverse as Jack Kerouac and Maya Angelou have
tried their hand at writing jazz poetry, often experimenting with jazz music
backgrounds to their own poetry readings, with varying degrees of literary
integrity and success. Jazz poetry mines jazz music for inspiratio
influence, and interlocution. In doing so, jazz poetry alludes to the live
black experience in America, as does jazz music, a cultural practice deriv
from socio-historical realities of African American communities. This
practice not only includes African survivals in African American langu

music, and culture, but also Euro-American influences affecting black life
the United States of America. The jazz poet Imamu Amiri Baraka clai
that
poetry is a form of music. . . . That's where poetry began; close to music,

close to dance, and for those of us who are in the Afro-American
community it's normal that music should be the music of our own people
because that's what we come up with. That's what we're born with, so
Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 17.1. 2011. Copyright ©

201 1 by HJEAS. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.
thaťs music . . . the first poetry that I knew was the poetry of the blues.
That's the first poetry that had any meaning to me. (Reilly 222-23)
Jazz and blues share musical roots in early African American music,
including slave worksongs, cries, hollers, spirituals, and ring shouts ("juba").
Blues musical styles, forms, melodies, and the blues scale permeate jazz, and
many blues have become jazz standards. Indeed, before World War II,
boundaries had not been established between blues and jazz. Prominent
early jazz performers such as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Earl Hines,
Jelly Roll Morton, and others made significant blues recordings and counted
the blues as a focal point of their repertoire. Baraka argues that "[t]he blues
impulse, absorbs the whole American experience, and it is jazz: broadened
instrumentally, harmonically, to take in a wider experience" (153). Likewise,
in a 1990 interview in Callaloo, , the superlative contemporary jazz trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis emphasizes that jazz is "first and foremost the blues. If
you aren't addressing the blues you can't be playing jazz" (Elie 272).
Jazz and blues also participate in a cultural tradition of adaptation
and reinterpretation of white musical instruments and genres to suit black
vernacular purposes. Henry Louis Gates's literary theoretical concept
"Signifying" refers to black revisions and translations of tropes,
techniques, language, and aesthetics from white sources (The Signifying
Monkey 60-61). Such interracial intertextuality involves a complex
relationship between source and derivation. Samuel Floyd deftly Signifies
Gates by applying the notion to music, observing that jazz and blues,
considered as texts, display frequent intertextuality in their use of quotes
that are riffs from old songs inserted into new songs (95). Jazz players have
often turned to the blues as root music of expressive interiority, as a way to
confess private pain and agony in an unsentimental, adult manner. Yet the
ritual of outing private emotions to an empathetic public can be traced to
the Black Church wherein sermons and music build community solidarity,
forging a symbiosis between performer and listener. In this way, secular
African American music is Signifyin(g) the Black Church, by recasting the
preacher as jazz soloist and the spirit-possessed sermonizer as the demon-
driven blues singer.
Signifying) blues poems "The Weary Blues" (1923) by Langston
Hughes and "Ma Rainey" (1932) by Sterling Brown illustrate how and what
constitutes jazz poetry. These poems enact a delicate balance between
describing the social conditions and acts of performing the blues, on the
one hand, and quoting genuine blues lyrics, on the other. This enacts alterity
10
by exchanging one perspective for that of the "other" within the same
literary work. Moreover, a tension exists between ideas of transcription (of
song lyrics and music) and performance (of speech). It is possible that the
transcription of vernacular music into written language will not only alter
literary expectations, but also those of orality. In both poems, actual blues
verses are set within a more elaborate structure of different free-verse
stanzas - yet both parts carry equal weight. Karen J. Ford notes that "su
blues and written blues are both verbal creations and thus share ma
linguistic resources: stress, alliteration, euphony, assonance, consonanc
and oral formulas, among others" (93).
Before engaging in a detailed analysis of the poems, I will explor
the association between words and music, the nature of jazz poetry, it
connection to jazz music, and the relationship between orality and litera
in black culture. Such a critique draws on multiple perspectives of soci
history, literary theory, cultural studies, and musical analysis, following the
paradigm of interdisciplinary American Studies scholarship.
Writing music
Intrinsic to any discussion about jazz poetry is the question "How
does literature "write music?" Although contrasts have been drawn betwe
orality vs. literacy and "inarticulate" music vs. "articulate" writin
numerous black writers have focused on the interconnection between
orality and literacy as an essential element of a Black narrative aest
Black modernity, particularly as represented by early Harlem Renaiss
thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Wel
Johnson, has often been characterized as privileging "great" literature
oral traditions. Yet a distinct ambivalence exists in their differentiation of
the oral from the written, of music from text. In his Preface to The Books of
American Negro Spirituals (1926), James Weldon Johnson famously asserted
that
[t]he recent emergence of a younger group of Negro artists,

preponderandy literary, zealous to be racial, or to put it better, determined
to be true to themselves, to look for their art material within rather than
without, got its first impulse, I believe, from the new evaluation of the
spirituals reached by the Negro himself. (11:19)
Blues lyrics are not metered in the traditional poetic sense. Blues singers
have free reign to insert unstressed syllables between the musical beats and,
11
conversely, to draw out a single word or syllable melismatically over several
beats. The rhythm is further complicated by syncopation, which dislocates
the vocal stresses from the musical downbeats. Nevertheless, each line of a
blues lyric is sung over approximately two musical bars - each with four
beats, the first and third accented plus the first beat in a third bar (1 2 3 411
2 3 4 1 1); the remainder of the four-bar phrase is left open for an
instrumental "break" or fill. As a result, the number of stresses in each blues
line tends toward five. And since the stressed and unstressed beats alternate,
the musical phrase, without confining the blues to anything like strict meter,
provides a framework over which lines of iambic pentameter naturally fit
(Dickson 30).
While the adaptation of oral culture to literary ends is never
uncomplicated, the accommodation of blues to poetry presents particular
difficulties. "Blues," writes folk musicologist Paul Oliver, "is for singing. It is
not a form of folk song that stands up particulady well when written down"
("Can't Even Write" 8). Similarly, Sherley Anne Williams contends that "ļbļlues
is essentially an oral form meant to be heard rather than read; and the
techniques and structures used to such powerful purpose in the songs cannot
always be transferred directly to the literary traditions within which, by
definition, Afro-American poets write" (542).
Poets who -wish to write blues often wind up poeticizing the form, but
the blues made literary often read as bad poetry instead of refined folk song.
David Chinitz confirms that
[t]he success of Hughes's blues poems depends on a self-concealing art Art

there must be if his lyrics are to "stand up well when written down," yet the
art must not be too visible if the poems are to preserve any semblance of
authenticity. It is a precarious balance ... to replicate the rough verses of the
folk singers would not suffice to convey, in print, the feeling of their blues. The
stylistic devices that add excitement and emotion to blues performance cannot
be captured in poetry by mere transcription ... (1 82)
Jazz poems inspired by the blues are not simply transliterations of blues
lyrics. Instead, they borrow and manipulate narrative structural techniques from
blues forms: the twelve-bar AAB (two analogous lines followed by a
contrasting third line)1 or the eight-bar AB (two contrasting lines),2 irregular
syllabic patterns over a regular beat, and an awareness of the expressive
power of caesura.
12
The jazzy blues of Langston Hughes
As unofficial poet laureate of Harlem, Langston Hughes derived
great inspiration from the everyday scenes and sounds of his surroundings.
Jazz and blues especially stimulated him, and he spent many hours in the
nightclubs of Harlem and Washington, D.C., listening and writing. Hughes
has claimed, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh
Street . . . had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going" (Rampersad
24). This influence can be seen clearly in such poems as "Jazzonia,"
"Harlem Night Club," "Montage of a Dream Deferred" (a book-length
suite of poems illustrating Harlem life), and, of course, "The Weary Blues."
In his autobiography T he Big Sea (1940), Hughes asserts that "The Weary
Blues," for which he was awarded his first poetry prize, "included the first
blues I'd ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when I was a kid"
(212).3
"The Weary Blues" (1923)
1 Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
5 By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
10 He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
15 Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan -
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
20 Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more -
13
25 "I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied -
I ain't happy no mo'
30 And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
35 He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
"The Weary Blues" describes an evening of listening to a jazz

pianist playing the blues in Harlem. One of the first poems to incorporate
basic blues forms, this landmark poem uses rural black dialect and includes
both eight- and twelve-bar blues lyrics to evoke both the style and
substance of the blues. As noted earlier, the twelve-bar blues lyric form is
generated by a first line which is repeated in the second line (the repeat
line), often with improvised alterations, and then rhymed in a third line that
responds to the first two (the response line). In Hughes's poetry, each line is
halved so that the stanza is presented in six lines rather than in three. In his
case, lines 1-2 perform the role of the twelve-bar blues stanza's first line,
lines 3-4 work together as the repeat line, and lines 5-6 constitute the
response. Chinitz aptly remarks that
Hughes also renewed the possibility of enjambment by writing out his

blues in half-lines, so that each of his syntactical units spreads over two
lines of print. Hughes's line breaks generally reflect such nuances of oral
performance as breaths and vocal pauses, but he often turns them to still
greater poetic advantage. Typically, Hughes will choose to end a line on a
minor word. This strategy heightens expectations of the syntactical
conclusion, paralleling a harmonic resolution in the music. It also isolates
the ensuing line so that visually, at least, it stands alone as a grammatical
unit. (186)
Clearly the blues unite the speaker and the performer in some way,
as the opening lines establish a relationship between the two: "Droning a
drowsy syncopated tune," and "[r]ocking back and forth to a mellow
croon," (lines 1-2) could refer either to the "I" or "negro" of "I heard a
negro play" (3). Who exactly is droning and swaying, the performer or the
14
listener? Or both? Hughes uses ambiguous syntax to suggest the listener's
identification with the singer, as they become conflated grammatically in
these opening lines. Patricia Bonner makes a salient observation that "the
blues experience . . . becomes a conglomeration of authentic personal
experiences. It becomes the story about what it is to be a poor black man
and woman in America. Blues songs, the songs of these black people,
become Hughes' poetic medium for describing this blues experience" (19).
Black poetic practice is marked by history, and that collective history
problematizes the expression of black subjectivity. By taking up vernacular
forms of the black community, a jazz poem cannot be read simply as a
discourse of individualization and internalization, but, rather, also as a
product of a more generalized African American culture. Keith Leonard
further develops this point in asserting that jazz and the blues are a
communal music, but even "the remarkably cohesive culture of jazz and
blues is constituted by individuals who consciously and semiconsciously
claim that community by claiming and manipulating similar forms of
expressive self-creation in the face of a common existential dilemma"
(846). 4
In reading the poem aloud, a person discovers that in general the
poem's verbal rhythms are similar to those of a classic blues: four steady
metrical beats in each line, spiced with syncopated rhythmic patterns
created by the syllables in between the feet/pulses. Hughes confesses to the
importance of orality in his poems: "The blues poems I would often make
up in my head and sing on the way to work" (The Big Sea 217). The opening
recalls the classic three-line twelve-bar blues lyric stanza (AAB), with a
rhyming couplet, "Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and
forth to a mellow croon" (lines 1-2), followed by a contrasting third line: "I
heard a Negro play" (3). Unlike standard blues lyrics, however, the
responding third line does not rhyme with the previous couplets. Barry
Wallerstein observes that this line not only "sets up an expectation that
Hughes slides away from by the end of the stanza," it also is followed by a
"delayed rhyme [that] comes back in the next stanza in a most unpredictable
way" (667):
I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night.
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway ...
He did a lazy sway . . . (lines 3-7)
15
At the end lines 6 and 7, the poem comes to an expressive pause. A caesura
is created in the tetrameter line by a rest/ silent foot, and that serves to
emphasize the lull.
"Down on Lenox Avenue" (line 4) presents an incongruity: Lenox
Avenue, a main street in Harlem, in terms of the geography of Manhattan,
is North, or actually uptown. Hughes specifies "down on Lenox Avenue"
rather than "up on Lenox Avenue" because those sections of New York
City south of Harlem (referred to as "downtown") were populated mainly
by whites, so if the writer had perceived Lenox Avenue as "up" from his
place of origin, that would be a telling inscription of whiteness. While
people of all races have experienced the blues (both the music and the
feelings) and musicians of all colors have played blues music, blacks have
often maintained that jazz and blues music must be considered original to
African Americans, whose shared historical experiences impart to music a
singular means of affirming self-dignity and humanity in the face of poverty
and racism. Baraka contends that "[t]he blues is particularly an Afro-
American expression, closer to the specific cultural and historical
development of the Afro-American nation and its multiple tributaries"
(153).
Furthermore, through music, blacks have found ways to adapt the
tools of white culture to suit their own needs:
With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
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, (lines 9-15)
The performer's ebony hands transform the white European

concert instrument into a medium for sweet blues "coming from a black
man's soul." This helps him transcend "his rickety stool," which represents
his life condition and not just physical furniture. "He played that sad raggy
tune like a musical fool" (13). "[R]aggy" refers not only to "raggedness" as a
sign of poverty, but also alludes to "ragtime," the style of the earlier "Weary
Blues" by Matthews. Furthermore, "a musical fool" may also suggest fool as
a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of
16
understanding, or one with a marked propensity or fondness for something.
But "fool" may also indicate a "sacred fool," a shaman who invokes deep
meanings inaccessible to everyday people living everyday lives. Wynton
Marsalis provides this insight into blues performers: "Do not misconstrue
the sadness in their eyes as a sign of defeat. It is the mark of a profound
loneliness, the heroic loneliness of those who sustain an intense relationship
with a reality so harsh as to burn the eyes of the unprepared who chance to
look upon it" (152).
"All the singer seems to have is his moaning blues, the revelation of
'a black man's soul,'" Steven C. Tracy points out, but he goes on to argue:
those blues are what helps keep him alive. Part of that ability to sustain is
apparently the way the blues help him keep his identity. Even in singing
the blues, he is singing about his life, about the way that he and other
blacks have to deal with white society. . . . The piano itself comes to life as
an extension of the singer, and moans, transformed by the black tradition
to a mirror of black sorrow that also reflects the transforming power and
beauty of the black musical tradition. (222)
Exposing the multiple levels of blues identity that lend themselves to

Signifi(cation), Tracy makes the important argument that the "blues" refers
to a variety of separate entities - an emotion, a technique, a musical form,
and a song lyric (59).
Commenting on the complex nature of the blues, Richard Wright
maintains that "[m]any knew that their hope was hopeless, and it was out of
this that the blues was born, the apex of sensual despair. A strange and
emotional joy is found in contemplating the blackest aspects of life" (qtd. in
Gayle 214). Moreover, blues singers and songs never fix experience in
transcendent form; they always address particularities. In Blues , Ideology, and
Afro-American Uterature (1984), Houston Baker suggests that "the blues and
its sundry performers offer interpretations of the experiencing of
experience. To experience the juncture's ever-changing scenes, like
successive readings of ever-varying texts by conventional translators, is to
produce vibrantly polyvalent interpretations encoded as blues" (7).
Hughes destabilizes the rhythmic proportions of standard twelve-
bar blues stanzas in lines 9 through 11 and 12 to 14. The invocations "O
Blues" and "Sweet Blues" answer the preceding iambic trimeter couplets
with abbreviated two pulses/feet, including an ending rest/ silent foot.
These three-line blues stanzas are reduced to two lines in 15 and 16, as
17
"Coming from a black man's soul" leads directly to a repeat invocation of
"O Blues." The threefold dimeter invocations of the "Blues" (11, 14, 16)
not only interrupt the flow of established meters; they act as harbingers of
the actual blues performance, introduced by a couplet that resumes in
iambic trimeters: "In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone / I heard
that Negro sing, that old piano moan - " (17-18).
Up to this point, the narrator has been speaking in verse that is
suggestive of but not exacdy identical with the blues. Significantly, in lines
19 to 22, the pianist sings at last in strict eight-bar blues lyrics form (AB)
Ain't got nobody in all this world,

Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin
And put ma troubles on the shelf. (19-22)
These lines express loneliness as well as a momentary hope that troubles

can be overcome by self-reliance and will power, in contrast with the next
three-couplet stanza, a twelve-bar blues lyric (AAB). The singer's mood
turns to verbalizing a world-weariness and a wish to die. Each ponderous
tetrameter line is marked by a caesura:
I got the Weary Blues

And I can't be satisfied
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied -
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died. (25-30)
This narrative progression from loneliness to determination to despondency

illustrates Ralph Ellison's argument that "the blues is an impulse to keep the
painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching
consciousness, to finger its jagged grain. ... As a form, the blues is an
autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically" (78).
R. Baxter Miller contends that in addition to the act of performing
music (which as an art form is transient, as it is both rooted in and limited
by the passing of time), the black singer-pianist is also performing black
identity, both as an individual and as an active agent in shaping a collective
Black self-image. Additionally, multiple narrative meanings exist
simultaneously in the poem, from the solitude communicated by the
performer to the empathetic reaction of the poet/narrator, from an earlier
18
invocation of self-reliance to survive and overcome life's obstacles to the
hopelessness and desire to end life's suffering heard later in the poem.
Miller maintains that "The Weary Blues"
completes the ritualistic conversion from Black American suffering into

epic communion .... From the dramatic situation of the player, both
musical as well as performed, the poem imposes isolation and loneliness
yet the refusal to accept them. The song marks a metonym for the human
imagination. In a deftness often overlooked, Hughes uses anaphora to
narrate an imperial self so as to sustain the blues stanza as countermelody
and ironic understatement: "Ain't got nobody in all this world, / Ain't got
nobody but ma self." What most complements the lyric skill is the
dramatic movement of feeling. (54-55)
Rejecting the image of an abject individual moaning the blues, in The

Hero and the Blues (1973) and Stomping the Blues (1976), Albert Murray
presents contrasting ideas about the place of blues and jazz in American
culture. For him, the "blues hero" is not simply a musician but th
embodiment of black experience and values. The blues idiom contains a
stylistic code for representing the most difficult conditions, but it als
provides a strategy for living with and triumphing over these condition
with grace and dignity.
A similar concept appears in a later text that Hughes co-wrote for
"Scenes in the City," the opening track on Charles Mingus's album,
Modern Ja^Z Symposium of Music and Poetry with Charles Mingus, released in 1957.
This text recounts a story of a man who lives in music, who wakes up every
morning "digging sound" and spends his days sitting on a bar stoo
"holding my dreams up to the sounds of jazz music." Melvin Stewart, wh
performed on this track, claims that "Jazz helps the man in this piece he
himself, the way he is and feels, and every note becomes a part of him an
helps him be at one with himself' (qtd. in Hentoff liner notes).
The ending of this poem expresses a profound ambiguity. Th
performer's stamina as a singer ("far into the night he crooned that tune
does not offset his feelings of woe, which finally appear to have undon
him when he "stopped playing and went to bed" (line 33) for "he slept li
a rock or a man that's dead" (35). The player has played himself out, and
is impossible to tell whether his life or his playing has contributed more
his undoing. William Hansell asserts that "whereas the body of the poe
suggests he has been successful in escaping his pain, in the conclusion th
musician appeals to death as the only permanent relief. It is only for th
19
duration of the music that he can transcend his sorrow" (25). Yet part of
the musician's ability to persevere rests on performing the blues. In singing
the blues, he sings some sense into his life, expressing the soul of the black
experience. The anonymous blues performance inspires the poet to explore
the paradox between the singer's performative agency and his resignation to
his fate as expressed in his blues lyrics. But the contradictions in the
musician's life deeply veil the specifics of what his music expresses.
Michael Cooke remarks that this poem contains a complex reversal.
The blues singer's self-declared isolation and his performing to the point of
catatonia, has been compromised by playing himself into the heart and
mind of the narrator in "The Weary Blues." Tellingly^ the last five lines
reveal as much about the poet as about the singer:
And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead, (lines 31-35)
As in the beginning, there is a conscious intermingling or merging

of the performer's and listener's experience. Chronological time is marked
by the winking out of the stars and the moon, and eventually the musical
performance ends, as it must, given time's limitations. Yet a contradiction
exists in that the actual music that has finished continues to exist as a
"virtual" music that echoes through the singer's head. Here we face one of
the innate paradoxes in music - how does a transient art form dependent
on changes in sound measured by the passage of time transcend temporal
limitations? And just how does the narrator know this denouement, unless
his empathetic powers transcend individual difference? Has the rapt listener
followed the singer home? In whose head does the Weary Blues
reverberate? Not only the singer's, but also the listener's, who experiences
Zora Neale Hurston's "singing . . . that had nothing to do with her ears"
(23), a music that connects itself to "other matters that had struck her
outside observation," transforming the way the protagonist conceives of her
place in the world (24). Cooke adds: "Not even the speaker's empathy with
the blues singer, though, can enable us to penetrate the latter's veil of sleep,
a veil as opaque as rock and as deep as death. It is an accident that offsets
the singer's repetitious self-veilings. Clearly he goes through his routine, his
20
ritual, every night, and just as clearly a Langston Hughes does not often
happen by" (173).
Feinstein asserts that Hughes was "the first major jazz poet," pointing
out that while white modernist Jazz Age poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Hart
Crane, and Carl Sandburg were most often dubbed "jazz poets" in the 1920s,
it was Hughes who pioneered the reading of poetry to jazz accompaniment at
intimate, semi-private gatherings during that era (42). Of greater relevance is
that Langston Hughes's poetry uses the rhythms of African American music,
particularly blues and jazz. This sets his poetry apart from that of other
writers of his time, and it spurred him to experiment with a very rhythmic
free verse. The depth of Hughes's connection to jazz is revealed in his poem
"Lenox Avenue: Midnight" (1926), a partner piece to "The Weary Blues,"
where the rural blues give way to urban jazz (Lenz 269). In this poem Hughes
declares that
The rhythm of life

Is a rhythm,
Honey.
The gods are laughing at us.
The broken heart of love,

The weary, weary heart of pain, -
Overtones,
Undertones,
To the rumble of street cars,
To the swish of rain. (The Weary Blues 39)
Hughes's jazz and blues poetry called into question Harlem

Renaissance leaders W. E. B. Du Bois's and Alain Locke's ideals of the
"talented tenth" or "cultured few" New Negro elite leading the creativ
flowering of African American culture in the 1920s and '30s. Hughes believe
that jazz and blues were essential ingredients in the democratic potentia
black cultural nationalism, and he worked to link elite African Ameri
literature to popular music: "Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and
bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears óf th
colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand" ("T
Negro Artist" 694). The popularity of the urban blues among black non-elite
social classes challenged the New Negro focus on spirituals as folk idioms th
would lead to a formalist black music with universal appeal. This clashed wit
Locke's hope that Hughes and other black poets would fashion "[n]ew bea
21
from the rhythm of the secular ballad but the imagery and diction of the
spiritual" ("Review of "The Weary Blues'" 41).
For Hughes, the blues were "sad songs" because they manifested
the "hopeless weariness" of an oppressed people; concomitandy, they were
"gay songs because you had to be gay or die" (The Big Sea 209). He sought
to capture this "blues spirit," an equilibrium of conflicting emotions, in his
poetry, not only by imitating, but also by Signifying) the blues. Here, it is
important to recognize the many distinct varieties of blues styles. As a
northern citydweller, Hughes was not only aware of the folk blues but also
of classic and urban blues, since his access to the blues was often
determined by commercial means, through recordings, in bars and
nightclubs.
Anita Patterson offers an additional perspective on how Hughes's
jazz poetry goes beyond style and subject matter to transferring musical to
literary techniques:
The convergence between Hughes's techniques and those of the American

avant-garde highlights the importance of métonymie style, and of the
historical knowledge that underlies the impulse toward formal experiment
and improvisation, as a relatively neglected feature of the modernist lyric .
. . . Hughes offers historical knowledge by directing our attention to his
careful arrangement of words on the page. His style often dramatizes how
language shapes the poem's social perspectives. (652, 655)
Engaging in intertextuality and Signifying on a grand scale, in 1958

Hughes crossed over to performing jazz in public by reading his work in "a
Hollywood club while backed by a jazz quartet, and. . . [in] Fisk University's
annual festival of music and art in the same role" (Hentoff "Langston
Hughes" 26). He also appeared at the landmark Village Vanguard in New
York City, accompanied by Charles Mingus and Phineas Newborn. That
collaboration eventually led to the Verve recording of the same year, The
Weary Blues , which features Hughes reading his poetry to music arranged by
Leonard Feather on side 1 and then to music by Charles Mingus on side 2.
The differences between the settings are striking: the Feather-Hughes side
presents jazz as background for a voiceover. It is an example of "poetry
read to jazz." On the other side, Mingus's music is too significant to ignore.
In the liner notes to the recording, Feather graciously concedes this point:
Most of the blues-directed material and all the gospel-related poems were
assigned to a traditional-style group, for which I wrote a few 12, 16, and 8-
22
bar blues themes or patterns, a couple of gospel-type numbers for
Testament, and co-ordinated solos by the sidemen. For the second side,
Charles Mingus wrote or improvised suitable material, always with a
sensitive ear to the content and meaning of Hughes' statements and
questions. . . . Mingus 's genius for controlling a group of men was never
clearer than on this session, as he set changes of mood, tempo and theme,
often quite spontaneously.
Mingus does more than support Hughes's reading: he demands

something of him. Mingus's music not only follows the dramatic narratives
in Hughes's poetry, it also educes a more vigorously expressive reading
from Hughes, especially on poems like "Big Ben" where the poet's normally
laconic delivery takes on greater tonal variety in response to the music. This
suggests that the most successful jazz/poetry collaborations are produced
when both poet and musicians respond to each other and when listeners
must pay equal attention to the meaning of the music as well as that of the
poetic text. Travis Jackson proposes that an analogy with ideal jazz
performances without poetry is useful: the musicians must approach their
task as one of simultaneous performance, listening, and interaction (45-51).
Furthermore, he goes on to claim that "the implications for jazz-poetry
collaborations couldn't be more clear: the musicians don't provide
accompaniment for the poet any more than the poet is merely a lyricist
adding interest to a musical work. Instead, all involved work toward creating
something greater than either musical performance or poetry alone might
accomplish" (362).
Such collaboration coincides with Hughes's detailed description of
his preferred method of involving jazz musicians with his own work:
Music should not only be background to the poetry, but should comment
on it. I tell my musicians, and I've worked with several groups, to
improvise as much as they care to around what I read. Whatever they
bring of themselves to the poetry is welcome to me. I merely suggest the
mood of each piece as general orientation. Then I listen to what they say
in their playing and that affects my own rhythms when I read. We listen to
each other, (qtd. in Patricia Johnson 12)
Hughes thinks of his voice as making an equivalent contribution to

a jazz performance as the musicians, by enunciating his words in dialogue
with instrumental improvisations. Thus poetry and music share the act of
listening and responding, bridging the divide between the reciting poet and
23
the performing musician: "Jazz seeps into words - spelled out words,"
Hughes wrote in 1956 ("Jazz: Its Yesterday, Today, and Its Potential
Tomorrow" 213).
Sterling Brown's heart of blues

If Hughes's "The Weary Blues" suggests individual realization and
communion in hearing a jazzy blues performance in an urban setting,
Sterling Brown's "Ma Rainey," written nine years later, depicts how the
eponymous blues singer communicates to a Southern rural black
community. Significandy, Brown conceives of the blues not only as a
product of the black American experience but also as the source of jazz:
Around themes of hard-luck, desperation, ironic contrasts between the

hope and the actuality - "the blues ain't nothing but the poor man's heart
disease" - grew up the Negro's secular songs of sorrow. Musically the
blues were suited to carry the burden of grief. Comprising twelve or
occasionally sixteen bars, involving certain simple harmonic changes,
stressing the "blue note" in which the third and seventh are not pitched
steadily but waver between flat and natural, they brought a poignance to
American music. They lend themselves to improvisation and are basic to
much hot jazz. ("Stray Notes on Jazz [Part 2]" 16)
Brown proceeds to hail the central role that blues women singers
have played in the development of jazz:
Women of expressive voices as impelling as cornets, as subde as clarinets,

sang in the small Negro theatres and honky-tonks. Among the best were
Ma Rainey, Bessie and Clara Smith, and Ida Cox . . . Louis Armstrong,
Tommy Ladnier, Joe Smith, one of the most creative cornetists, Buster
Bailey and Coleman Hawkins (who play so differendy now) and James P.
Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, great influences today, learned jazz
from the roots by accompanying these singers. ("Stray Notes" 17)
Albert Murray concurs with Sterling Brown's contention that jazz

comes from, and is a form of, blues music. "The blues is a device for
transcending, or at least coping with, adversity," Murray observes, calling
jazz "the music used to stomp away the blues" (Moss 5). Murray presents
improvisation within a framework of a communal tradition as critical to the
spirit of resistance that led to progress in ameliorating the conditions of
black life in America. In The Blue Devils of Nada , he argues that "a fully
24
orchestrated blues statement is a fundamental device for confrontation,
improvisation, and existential affirmation: a strategy for acknowledging the
fact that life is a lowdown dirty shame and for improvising or riffing on the
exigencies of the predicament" (14).
Brown agrees declaring that the blues "has a bitter honesty. This is
the way the blues singers and their poets have found life to be. And their
audiences agree" ("The Blues" 288). This claim is echoed by Wynton
Marsalis, who, when asked what he thought were the essential elements of
Jazz, declared, "Number one is playing blues." Pressed to explain what he
meant by "blues," he replied: "I mean the philosophy of it. Blues gives the
jazz musician an unsentimental view of the world. . . . Albert Murray has
written one of the greatest books on jazz, Stomping the Blues , which is on
blues, but is one of the greatest books written about the poetics of jazz
music, what the musician should be trying to do" (qtd. in Scherman 67).
Brown's first book of poetry, Southern Road (1933), is a collection
with rural themes that treat the simple lives of poor, black, country folk
with poignancy and dignity. He uses authentic black country dialect and
structures from rural oral traditions to address what he perceives to be a
profound cultural crisis facing African Americans: the gradual fading away
of their rural cultures as they migrated to the urban, industrialized
economies of the North, with a concomitant loss of meaningful art. As
early as the 1920s, Jean Toomer bemoaned the fact that ". . . the Negro of
the folk-song has all but passed away; the Negro of the emotional church is
fading. ... In my own . . . pieces that come nearest to the old Negro, to the
spirit saturate with folksong ģ . . the dominant emotion is a sadness derived
from a sense of fading . . ." (Scruggs 290-91). Sadly, although Southern Road
was critically acclaimed as one of the greatest achievements of its decade,
Brown was unable to find a publisher for a second volume of poetry for
more than four decades; he published no more poetry until 1975.
The loss of folklore was especially worrisome to Brown, not only
because it had helped African American culture renew itself, but also
because it had served as a medium through which individuals developed
and passed on effective strategies for surviving racial oppression. Brown
anticipated that African Americans who moved to urban areas (as Hughes
had) would no longer create the songs and stories that devised and
communicated new strategies for survival. He feared that they would
passively consume a bigoted popular culture, or even worse, be co-opted
into producing entertainment that pandered to the economic demands and
oversimplified tropes of mainstream culture (as bell hooks, Michael Eric
25
Dyson, and Dennis Rome have observed about the misogynistic, violent
"gangsta" typecasting currendy promoted in certain genres of rap).5
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. further observes:
Not only were most of Brown's poems composed in dialect, but they also
had as their subjects distinctively black archetypal mythic characteristics, as
well as the black common man whose roots were rural and Southern. . . .
Brown renders in a style that emerged from several forms of folk
discourse, a black vernacular matrix that includes the blues and ballads, the
spirituals and worksongs. Indeed, Brown's ultimate referents are black
music and mythology. His language, densely symbolic, ironical, and natural
indirect, draws upon the idioms, figures and tones of both the sacred and
the profane vernacular traditions. ("Songs of a Racial Self' 227-28)
As an African American intellectual in the early twentieth century,

Brown sought to find a voice that would serve the emergent African
American national enterprise, by speaking and sounding reality that was
identifiably and self-consciously black and empowering. He did so at a time
exemplified by Post-Reconstruction's betrayed hopes and open brutality
towards blacks, as well as cultural practices such as blackface minstrelsy.
What was required was a deft mixture of a formal mastery of language,
improvisatory creativity that was unbounded by conventional wisdom, and a
fierce dedication to the power of self-identification as seen in his
Signifying) on Robert Penn Warren's poetic line "Nigger, your breed ain't
metaphysical" with a devastating riposte: "Cracker, your breed ain't
exegetical" (Sanders, "Sterling A. Brown" 393). Exegesis, hermeneutics, the
power of analyzing and interpreting African American cultural identity, had
passed from authoritative whites to black intellectuals themselves.
In 1941, Brown stated that "white authors dealing with the
American Negro have interpreted him in a way to justify his exploitation.
Creative literature has often been a handmaiden to social polic/' (Davis and
Lee 3). Lorenzo Thomas remarks that while Brown exposed and analyzed
these pernicious black stereotypes as a critic, as a poet he sought to counter
them with "social realist portraiture based on forms indigenous to the African
American community" (410). Mark Sanders comments that Sterling Brown's
"Afro-modernist" poems refute "objectified blackness [in modernist literary
discourses and practices that] serves as a repository of reifying antithesis" by
which "whiteness, the sign of humanity, intelligente, and civilization, achieves
coherence." In essence, "the claim of historicity . . . [and] of both social and
26
psychic complexity [become] the salient rejoinder to assertions of black
absence, antithesis [and] stasis" (75).
A generation later during the 1960s, Larry Neal echoed Brown's
concerns and beliefs in the classic Black Power text that he wrote with
Imamu Amiri Baraka, Black Fire (1968): "To explore the black experience
means that we do not deny the reality and the power of the slave culture;
the culture that produced the blues, spirituals, folk songs, and 'jazz'. . . . The
models for what Black literature should be are found primarily in our folk
culture, especially in the blues and jazz" (6). Neal follows up by asserting
black culture has found its most perfect expression in a black music that has
transformed black history into a "collective ritual," rooted in the "collective
psyche" and "spiritual togetherness" ("Black Art and Black Liberation"
653). This particular vision of the central role that musicians play in forming
black identity recurs in Ron Wellburn's essay on new black music of the
1960's:
What ever constitutes a Black Aesthetic has and will rest on the musician.
The black musician is ahead of everyone in the expression of true black
sensibility. For him [her], negritude or soul or blackness has never been a
matter for soapbox articulation .... Our music is our key to survival.
(128)
In "Ma Rainey," Brown ingeniously Signifies on conventional ballad

and classic blues forms to create an epic blues ballad. In this gripping
portrait of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the husky-voiced mother of the blues,
Brown evokes the sudden magic of her entrance on stage with a sequined
gown hugging her short, stocky frame; an elaborate gold necklace adorning
her cleavage; tasseled earrings; smiling a brilliant, gold-toothed smile. But
even more than giving us a vivid portrait of the beloved blues singer, he
celebrates the folks who flocked to hear "Ma do her stuff." "An' some
jokers keep deir laughs a-goin' in de crowded aisles, / An' some folks sits
dere waitdn' wid deir aches an' miseries . . ." (lines 23-24). Brown effectively
frames these portrayals with a performance by Ma Rainey, where she is on
stage expressing the pain and suffering of her people. She sings "'bout de
hard luck / Roun' our do' / . . . 'bout de lonesome road / We mus' go . . ."
(35-38). Her power over her audience stems from her ability to transform
the chaos and uncertainty of their lives into stories that can be recognized
and understood by the whole community.
27
Although Sterling Brown had seen and heard Ma Rainey in his
youth, he never heard her sing "Backwater Blues," a classic blues statement
about the Mississippi, Missouri, and Arkansas floods of 1927. He fused an
account from someone who had heard her sing that song with his own
impressions of her as a performer, of the people in her audiences and of the
region devastated by the great floods to create what Sterling Stuckey has
called "perhaps the Blues poem" ( Southern Road xxvii). It is important to
recognize that, purely in terms of formal structure, this poem is not a blues
poem at all. It is rather an exemplary representation of the spirit and power
of the blues and their historic role as ritual in Black life.
Ma Rainey was the first nationally recognized female blues singer,
and as Angela Davis declares, "Gertrude [Ma] Rainey established the blues
as women's music and became a mentor for countless women musicians"
(138). Her influence was not confined to her lifetime, but extends to current
musicians such as contemporary blues singer Koko Taylor, who listened
constandy to Rainey's and other blues women's recordings as a child. "What
these women did - like Ma Rainey - they was the foundation of the blues.
They brought the blues up from slavery up to today" (from an interview in
Wild Women Don't Have the Blues). Born in 1886, Ma Rainey was only one
generation removed from slavery, and she remained solidly anchored in the
rural culture of southern black people. Rainey made over ninety-two records
between 1923 and 1928, but more importandy, she performed in hundreds
of southern tent shows, indelibly inscribing herself on the public and private
consciousness of many rural southern blacks.
Within black culture, the figure of the female blues singer represents
an oral and musical women's culture that explicitly addresses cultural and
political struggles over sexuality, objectification, and power. Williams argues
that early blues singers "helped to solidify community values and heighten
community morale in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"
(543). She contends that the blues are an expression of a collective black
experience which became a "complex interweaving of the general and the
specific" of individual and group experience, through call and response.
Thus the blues are "Signifying" Black church services, in form and
substance. The preacher's sermon calls and the ecstatic responses of his
congregation are the signified. John Coltrane famously commented on how
audiences heard "we" even when the singer said "I" in blues performances
(O'Meally 473).
Neal affirms the notion that the blues and the Black Church are
inextricably linked:
28
At the pulsating core of their emotional center, the blues are the spiritual
and ritual energy of the church thrust into the eyes of life's raw realities.
Even though they appear to concern themselves primarily with the secular
experience . . . they are, in fact, extensions of the deepest, most pragmatic
spiritual and moral realities. Even though they primarily deal with the
world as flesh, they are essentially religious. Because they finally celebrate
life and the ability of man to control and shape his destiny. The blues
don't jive. (123)
"Ma Rainey" (1932)
I When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun',
5 From Cape Girardeau,
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff;
Comes fliwerin' in,
10 Or ridin' mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin' fools . . .
That's what it's like,
Fo' miles on down,
15 To New Orleans delta
An' Mobile town,
When Ma hits
Anywheres aroun'.
II
Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements,

20 From blackbottom comrows and from lumber camps;
Dey stumble in de hall, jes a-laughin' an' a-cacklin',
Cheerin' lak roarin' water, lak wind in river swamps.
An' some jokers keeps deir laughs a-goin' in de crowded aisles,

An' some folks sits dere waitin' wid' deir aches an' miseries,
29
25 Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin' gold-toofed smiles
An' Long Boy ripples minors on de black an' yellow keys.
III
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo' song;
Now you's back
30 Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong. . . .
0 Ma Rainey,
Li'l an' low;
35 Sing us 'bout de hard luck
Roun' our do';
Sing us 'bout de lonesome road
We mus' go . . .
IV
1 talked to a fellow, an' the fellow say,

40 "She jes' catch hold of us, somekindaway.
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night,

Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll

45 Thousan's of people ain't got no place to go.
'Den I went an' stood upon some high ol' lonesome hill,
An' looked down on the place where I used to live.'
An' den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an' cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an' cried,
50 An' Ma lef de stage, an' followed some de folks outside."
Dere wasn't much more de fellow say:

She jes' gits hold of us dataway.
"Ma Rainey'"s four part structure suggests a literary counterpoint.

In Part I, Brown evokes the singer's influence over an extended black
30
community by listing localized place names from which her audience
comes: "Cape Girardeau, Poplar Bluff' (lines 5-6), then widening his scope
to more general areas such as "New Orleans delta / An' Mobile town" (15-
16). These geographical points are set in motion, as suggested by how her
"flock" travels to see her:
Comes fliwerin' in,

Or ridin' mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin' fools . . . (9-12)
Line 12 emphasizes the holiday aspect of Ma Rainey's performances down

South, and also the "crazy" way that black folks are dedicated to (and
"stupid" about) overcoming obstacles of time and distance to come to hear
Ma Rainey. Throughout Part I, Brown demonstrates his range with
perpetually moving stresses, using masculine endings and occasional rhymes
to keep the couplets from plunging into free verse. Yet all the while he
employs enjambment and irregular stresses to sustain a sense of motion,
creating a rolling, tumbling affect.
Part II contains detailed descriptions of where these "picknickin'
fools" come from: "from de little river setdements, / From blackbottom
cornrows and from lumber camps" (19-20) and they are identified with the
forces of nature encountered in rural environments: "Cheerin' lak roarin'
water, lak wind in river swamps" (22). There is a growing expansiveness t

the length of lines, as compared to the pithy lines of Part I. The last two
lines of this section constitute a curtain raising, with a description of a piano
introduction and Ma Rainey coming out onstage:
Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin' gold-toofed smiles

An' Long Boy ripples minors on de black an' yellow keys.
(25-26)
The rhythmic character of the lines in Part II is more complex than

that of Part I. Although each single line is in tetrameter, there is much
multisyllabic variation in between the feet. Instead of a steady stream of
couplets, Brown switches to modified ballad form (abcb* dede), following
the standard pattern of four iambic lines of four stresses each. The
exception is line 22, which begins with a stressed syllable - "Cheerin' lak
roarin' water . . . ."
31
In Part III, Brown completely shifts from a heterodiegetic to
homodiegetic narrative by speaking directly to Ma Rainey, instead of
continuing to describe the audience and Ma Rainey's onstage performance.
This stark, dramatic change in narrative voice conflates the voice of the
poet speaking himself and for the people in the audience in particular,
gradually encompassing the southern black community in general. In so
doing, he invokes her power as part of the ritual of call and response.
O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo' song;
Now you's back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong . . . (27-32)
Stephen Henderson makes the apposite observation that
[t]he expression "Sing yo' song" is still current in the Black community.
People say it spontaneously when they are moved by someone who
appeals to their deepest concerns, whether a gospel singer or Aretha
Franklin singing about hard times in love. And they compliment her by
saying, Sing your song, because the song is theirs too. She gives them back
themselves and they return the love and the truth: "Now you's back" with
us, "Whah you belong" - and now with this kind of singing you're
affirming our truth . . . here it is compressed, transubstantiated into song,
personal commentary transmuted into communal statement. ("The Heavy
Blues of Sterling Brown" 37)
In singing "Backwater Blues," Ma Rainey is not just singing the

truth about a tragedy of human experience. She unites with her listeners to
face the harsh, irrational forces in life. Hers is a voice for a community,
singing about the misfortune and isolation of the black rural Southern
experience:
O Ma Rainey,
Li'l an' low;
Sing us 'bout de hard luck
Roun' our do';
Sing us 'bout de lonesome road
We mus' go... (33-38)
32
The first two and the last two lines in Part IV create a cyclical
structure framing a detailed description of the effect of Ma Rainey's
performance of "Backwater Blues" on her audience. Following a direct
quotation from six lines of her song (42-47), the audience responds by
weeping collectively (48-50). In describing real calamities, Ma Rainey forces
her listeners to face the "bitter honesty" of re-experiencing the tragedy of
floods in the rural Southern lowlands.
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
'It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night,

Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll

Thousan's of people ain't got no place to go.
"Den I went an' stood upon some high ol' lonesome hill,
An' looked down on the place where I used to live.'
An' den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an' cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an' cried,
An' Ma lef de stage, an' followed some de folks outside." (41-50)
This description of how deeply Ma Rainey's performance has moved her

audience echoes Williams's contention that
much of the verbal strength of the blues resides in the directness with
which the songs confront experience and in what Stephen Henderson
identifies as "mascón images," Afro American archetypes which represent
"a massive concentration of black experiential energy." Often the mascons
are not really images in the literary sense of the word, rather they are
verbal expressions which evoke a powerful response in the listener
because of their direct relationship to concepts and events in the collective
experience. (550)
"She sang Backwater Blues one day" (41) forms a tercet with lines
39-40 that leads into her quoted blues lyrics. What stands out in lines 42
through 47 is that Brown subverts the expectations of a 12 bar blues (the
original form of "Back Water Blues" ) by cutting out the repetition of the
first line in each couplet. Line 47 brings us to a full-stop by enhancing the
rhythmic pause between stanzas with the unexpected final word "live,"
33
which does not rhyme with the previous line's "hill." The ensuing tercet
(48-50) describes the effect Ma Rainey's singing has on her audience,
summed up by a final couplet (51-52). This poem demonstrates how far
Sterling Brown has moved beyond a sense of obligation to produce
recognizably standard forms. Gaining intellectual credibility by adhering to
Eurocentric standards was not his way. Instead, there is an unabashed and
forthright dedication to render accurately a folk voice with all its power,
eloquence, and improvisatory freedom.
Harlem Renaissance aspirations for a black national voice were
fulfilled in some measure by popular music performers such as Ma Rainey,
Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Big Bill Broonzy, and Robert Johnson. In
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, the distinguished African American
scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr. rightly highlights the unusual choice of the
ferociously intellectual young Sterling Brown to embrace a form devised by
those who were illiterate (92-93). Perhaps a significant clue as to why he
chose to do so is found in "Ma Rainey." Brown was not alone in hoping
that Rainey's ability to "jes catch hold of us, somekindaway" (40) or "jes'
gits hold of us dataway" (53) through singing the blues is a kind of truth-
telling6 that would enable African American people to unite in their struggle
for a better future.
Henderson writes that the blues
are a music and a poetry of confrontation - with the self, with the family
and loved ones, with the oppressive forces of society, with nature, and on
the heaviest level, with fate and the universe itself. And in the
confrontation a man finds out who he is, a woman discovers her
strengths, and if she is a Ma Rainey, she shares it with the community and
in the process becomes immortal. ("The Heavy Blues of Sterling Brown"
32)
Neal extends this argument to make a further point about how blues singers
Signify black preachers:
The blues singer is not an alienated artist moaning songs of self-pity and
defeat to an infidel mob. He is the voice of the community, its historian,
and one of the shapers of its morality. . . . He is the bearer of the group's
working myths, aspirations, and values. And like the preacher, he has been
called on by the Spirit to rap about life in the sharpest, the harshest terms
possible .... (ťCBlack Art and Black Liberation" 123-24)
34
Sterling Brown's involvement with the blues is by no means
exclusive. His poetry spans the gamut of black experience and black music.
In "No More Worlds to Climb," jazz plays a part in the story of Alec, the
boodegger, whose ill-gotten gains subsidize his move from the slums to the
"dicty section" of town, where he denounces the shameful behavior of the
poor he left behind. "Children's Children" is directed at a young, urban
black audience, chiding them for ignoring or rejecting spirituals and old
folksongs in favor of vacandy listening to saccharine pop songs. "Cabaret"
is a stark contrast to "Ma Rainey," describing a jazz band performance of a
paean to Southern floods as an alternative to Ma Rainey's authentic voice
singing "Backwater Blues." It portrays the effect that the marketplace has
had on urban African-American artistic production, cutting between images
of black peonage in the Deep South, the great floods of 1927, and images of
black chorines and musicians performing jazz for an all-white audience at a
Chicago speakeasy.
The jazz band unleashes its frenzy.
Now, now,
To it, Roger; that's a nice doggie ,
S how your tricks to the gentlemen.
The trombone belches, and the saxophone

Wails curdlingly, the cymbals clash,
The drummer twitches in an epileptic fit
Muddy water
Round my feet
Muddy water (10-19)
Muddy water, river sweet (32)
There's peace and happiness there

I declare (35-36)
(Feinstein and Komunyaka 22)
Inside this cabaret, "1927, Black and Tan, Chicago," the setting and
emotional response are irreconcilable with those described in "Ma Rainey."
In "Cabaret" the African-American entertainers are degraded by white
"overlords" as part of the act, instead of being cherished by their own
people. The "muddy water" allusion to "river sweet" and "peace and
35
happiness there" is a grotesque delusion. Downriver in the Delta black
people are being brutalized: some drowned, others left to die, some beaten
on the chain gang or murdered trying to escape. This frenzied, artificial
"act" is as far from Ma Rainess honest performance as the Jo Trent's
"Muddy Water" song is from the blues. In this setting, Sterling Brown
offers no communal consolation, no genuine folk voice. Absence of any
saving grace serves to caution the reader against reifying sentimentalized,
naive notions of the Jazz Age.
Many songs, including the Tin Pan Alley song "Muddy Water" and
"Backwater Blues" were written about the ruinous floods of 1927. What is
lacking in "Muddy Water," and conversely serves to strengthen the impact
of "Backwater Blues," is that only the latter describes how some 600,000
people, largely blacks, were not only made homeless but were also later
exposed to the untender mercies of white landowners who exploited a
corruptly administered relief program. This event and its repercussions
seemed to be a calamity from which black communal life in the South
would never recover. Certainly, much Southern black culture and economic
welfare were definitively and traumatically disrupted by these catastrophic
floods.7
And yet the fluid body of black folksong and folk speech, affected
as it is by changing social, economic, and political conditions, persists as an
embodiment and historical record of the Black Experience in America.
Henderson believes that
it is this aspect of the black tradition that seems capable of supporting a

literary production that could rival that of its instrumental music. That was
the special achievement of Langston Hughes and later of Sterling Brown.
As one moves from James Weldon Johnson to Langston Hughes and
Sterling Brown to Imamu Baraka, there is, in effect, a greater
appropriation of blues and related forms and materials as blacks take an
increasingly analytical and hardnosed look at their lives in the United
States. ("The Blues as Black Poetry" 28-29)
Conclusion
Hughes and Brown ingeniously transform standard twelve-bar

eight-bar blues forms, while their strategically placed disruptions
steady flow of standard meter recall the sudden stops and star
improvised jazz. Gates declares that
36
Improvisation ... so fundamental to the very idea of jazz is "nothing
more" than repetition and revision. In this sort of revision, again where
meaning is fixed, it is the realignment of the signifier that is the signal trait
of expressive genius. ... It is this principle of repetition and difference,
this practice of intertextuality, which has been so crucial to the black
vernacular forms of Signifying, jazz . . . the blues, spirituals and ragtime.
(63-64)
Baker proposes that the improvisational forms of African- American

music are the public enactment of the African American individual's
common human agency to define and to validate him or herself through
personalized, idiosyncratic versions of the received cultural forms and
discourses that might otherwise isolate the person in a world without
absolute meaning (Modernism 3). Komunyakaa supports this argument by
describing black music as "the main thread that linked us to the future, was
a process of reclaiming ourselves. Being in motion - improvisation,
becoming - this was the root of our creativity" (qtd. in Kelly 646).
Signifying on blues, black poetry, and improvisation as motion,
Henderson avers:
What is needed - what is being realized - is that real people produced this
art - out of a direct confrontation with the daily reality of their lives, and
the history of degradation, a painful history. . . . Perhaps the American
public will have the courage to take the next step - full responsibility for
our collective past, and for our future. We have the mechanism for that
exploration. Our Black and Unknown Bards invented it. We call it Black
poetry; they called it the blues, "Survival motion set to music." ("The
Blues as Black Poetry" 29-30)
Jazz poets gain their lyric mastery not by merely gaining complete
control over academic studies of recorded written and aural sources of jazz
and blues lore, but by immersing themselves in the actual cultural traditions
from which that music comes. Deep knowledge and artistry comes from
familiarity with how jazz is played and blues is moaned. In Figures in Black:
Words, Signs, and the "R adal" Self (1987), Gates proposes that any reading of
black poetry is that of translation of the music itself into meaningful
language:
The music is the poetry of the rhythmic word; the printed word cannot be
fully understood as "meaning" if treated alone - there is no escape from
37
this. Syntax itself, in these forms, becomes music. The use of dialect in
poetry, for instance, must be seen in the context of the music from which
it springs - black speech and black music . . . which is the final referent.
(187)
Poetry Signifies music and speech; black poets Signify musicians

who in turn Signify preachers. Returning to earlier questions about
relationships between orality and literacy, "inarticulate" music and
"articulate" writing, contemporary poet Etheridge Knight reaffirms Baraka's
previous assertions about the interconnection between music and poetry:
I understand poetry and the poet as a song - as a chant; the poem and the
poet are like songs. They are mystical. When you say things in a chant,
they take on a different meaning from what you say - and you may be
saying the same words - in everyday speech. What's involved is music - a
kind of arrangement of the sounds that create in you a certain feeling. . . .
In music, a certain beat is set up and you find yourself patting your foot.
These are the same rituals in poetry. That's the reason for the devices in
poetry - rhyme and rhythm. They set up a oneness. . . . Basically, I see the
poet as singing in a sense that his sounds are put together in harmony or
in a structure which differs from just plain talking. I see poets basically as
singers, as preachers, as prophets. (Rowell 974)
Hughes's and Brown's poetry seeks to convey realistic yet complex

descriptions of black musicians, their jazzy blues, and how that music
affects their listeners. Their poems represent the socio-historical realities of
diverse African American experiences marked by history, of urban
individuals as well as rural communities. Both poets achieve a special
synthesis of blues perspective and blues form in its many permutations.
They are not folk poets, but poets in the folk manner, who artfully mask
their literary craft with sounds of speech, nuances of rhythm, texture, and
meaning from black oral tradition itself. This returns us to Gates's concept
of Signifying) - "black double-voicedness; because it always entails formal
revision and intertextual relation" (The Signifying Monkey 51). "The Weary
Blues" and "Ma Rainey" demonstrate how jazz poetry is an intertextual
genre, entailing writing and reciting words that evoke the sounds and lyrics
of music. Appreciating this allusive interplay between art forms is a key to
entering these blues.
Scripps College, Claremont, CA
38
Notes
1 The blues is a primary musical form in jazz and jazz-related music. M
common is the twelve-bar blues, divided into three four-bar phrases, altogether form
full chorus. It is in 4/4 meter, establishing a rhythmic pattern of four regular beats pe
Harmony is usually limited to triadic chords on the I (tonic), IV (subdominant), a
(dominant) pitches of a diatonic scale. The tonic chord is typically prominent in the
four-bar phrase, leading to the subdominant chord in the second phrase, followed b
dominant chord in the last four bars (ABC musical pattern).
Repetition of either two- or four-bar melodic or rhythmic motifs is very comm
In contrast, most lyrics to a twelve-bar blues song are in AAB pattern. A singer wil
the same lines on the first and second four-bar verses as repeated calls, answered
response featuring a different line on the third four-bar verse. Listeners are challenge
cognitive dissonance between the basic blues chord progressions (ABC) and the lyrics
their complementary melodic phrases (AAB). This creative tension between
simultaneous aural paradigms may help explain jazz players' endless fascination with
twelve-bar blues.
2 The eight-bar blues deviates from the standard twelve-bar blues pattern as a
more open form, incorporating many variations in playing patterns. It takes eight 4/ 4 bars
to the verse. The basic eight-bar blues pattern begins with the I (tonic) chord in the first
two bars, proceeding on to the IV (subdominant) chord on bars 3 and 4, returning to the I
(tonic) chord on the fifth bar, moving to the V (dominant) chord in bar six, and finally
returning to the I (tonic) chord in bars 7 and 8 (AABBACAA). Chord substitutions are
often made on bars two, four, and/ or eight to make the harmony more interesting. Lyrics
often work in couplets, repeating the opening two-bar phrase in bars three and four,
introducing a textual alteration in the third couplet in the fifth and six bars before returning
to the opening couplet in the final two bars (AB AB ACAB). Again, interest is compounded
by an underlying disparity between the musical structure and the verse form.
3 Hughes's account is complicated by the existence of a popular American song
written and published in 1915 by Artie Matthews called "The Weary Blues," eight years
before Langston Hughes wrote his landmark poem. Despite its tide, the song is a jaunty
multi-strain ragtime rather than a conventional blues. During the early twentieth century,
many "hot" or "raggy" numbers were published with the word "blues" in the title, since
genre categories had not been standardized. This rag is often known by the alternative title
"Shake It and Break It," especially in New Orleans Dixieland Jazz Band performances. The
first recording of this song was made by Yellow Nunez with the Louisiana Five in 1919.
The tune has become a perennial jazz standard, so it is likely that Hughes had heard it. Jazz
luminaries who have made recordings of this song include the New Orleans Rhythm
Kings, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, and the Dorsey Brothers. Upon
listening to this ingenious, upbeat vaudeville-sounding tune, it is plausible to conclude that
instead of emulating an old blues from childhood memory, Hughes intended his own "The
Weary Blues" poem to be the eponymous ragtime song's literary foil.
4 In his early essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), Hughes
reflects on the relationship between individual artist and his community by offering an
insight into how to appreciate his bluesy jazz poetry: ". . . the Negro artist offers his racial
individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often,
39
as in the blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears" (693).
5 As discussed in Michael Eric Dyson's chapter "Gangsta Rap and American
Culture"; bell hooks's seminal article "Misogyny, Gangsta Rap, and the Piano"; and Dennis
Rome's book Black Demons : The Media* s Depiction of the African American Male Criminal
Stereotype (especially 101-02).
6 Blues singers are keenly aware of the threat to the status quo posed by the truth-
telling aspect of their music, as Henry Townsend reveals in an interview with Samuel B.
Charters: "You know I'm going to put this a little blunt. I don't know if I should say it or
not, because it might hurt the religious type of people, but when I sing the blues, I sing the
truth. ... [T] he blues, from a point of explaining yourself as facts, is the truth and I don't
feel that the truth should be condemned . . ." (543-44).
7 The event which both Brown's poems "Cabaret" and "Ma Raine/' address was
a series of natural disasters in 1927 that left indelible impressions on the southern rural
black folk psyche. Paul Oliver, the blues historian, provides a powerful description of what
happened:
No one had anticipated the full horror of the 1927 floods. Houses were washed
away with their terrified occupants still clinging to the roof-tops . . . isolated
figures whom none could rescue were last seen crying for help as they hung in the
gaunt branches of shattered trees ... in the surging, eddying, boiling waters which
extended as far as eyes could see . . . twenty-eight thousand square miles of land
were under water. Whole townships were engulfed and the frightened people -
largely Negroes - made for the hills at Helena and Vicksburg. (263-67)
Works Cited
Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideolog)/ and African American Uterature. Chicago:

of Chicago P, 1984. Print.
Print.
Baraka, Imamu Amin, Langston Hughes and th

Daggers and Javelins: Essays , 1974-1979 . New Y
1984. Print.
Bonner, Patricia. "Cryin' the Jazzy Blues and Livin' Blue Jazz: Analyzing the
Blues and Jazz Poetry of Langston Hughes." West Georgia College
Review 20 (1990): 15-28. Print.
Brown, Sterling. Southern Road. 1932. Intr. Sterling Stuckey. Boston: Beacon,
1974. Print.
Print.
Chinitz, David. "Literacy and Authenticity:

Hughes." Callaloo 19.1 (1996): 177-92. Prin
40
Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The
Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Print.
Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Print.
Davis, Arthur P., and Ulysses Lee, eds. The Negro Caravan. 1941. Salem:
Ayer, 1987. Print.
Dickson, L. L. '"Keep It in the Head': Jazz Elements in Modern Black
American Poetry." MELUS 10.1 (1983): 29-37. Print
Dyson, Michael E. "Gangsta Rap and American Culture." The Michael Eric
Dyson Reader. New York: Basic Books, 2004. 411-17. Print
Elie, Lolis E. "An Interview with Wynton Marsalis." Callaloo 13.2 (1990): 271-
90. Print.
Ellison^ Ralph. "Richard Wrighťs Blues." Shadow and Act. 1964. New York:
Vintage, 1995. 77-94. Print
Feather, Leonard. Liner Notes. Langston Hughes, Challes Mingus, and
Leonard Feather. The Weary Blues. Rec. 18 March 1958. Verve, 1990.
CD.
Feinstein, Sascha. Ja%g Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1997. Print.
Indiana UP, 1991. Print.

Ford, Karen J. "These Old Writing Paper Blues: The Bl
Poetry." Diversity and American Poetries. College
1997): 84-103. Print
Floyd, Samuel. The Power of Black Music. New York: OU
Gates, Henry L. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-A
New York: OUP, 1988. Print
Print.
Gayle, Jr., Addison. Black Expression. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1967.
Print
Hansell, William. "Black Music in the Poetry of Langston Hughes: Roots, Race,
Release." Obsidian 4 (1978): 16-38. Print
Henderson, Stephen E. "The Blues as Black Poetry." Callaloo 16.5 (Oct. 1982):
22-30. Print.
Black American Literature Forum 14.1 (1980): 32-44.
41
Hentoff, Nat Liner Notes. A Modern Ja%% Sympońum of Music and Poetry with
Charles Mimus. Bethlehem, 1958. LP.
26-27. Print.
hooks, bell. "Misogyny, Gangsta Rap, and The Piano." Z

29. Print.
Hughes, Langston. "Jazz: Its Yesterday, Today, and It

Christopher C. De Santis, ed. Langston Hughes and t
Essays on Race, Politics and Culture, 1942-62. Chic
1995. 212-13. Print
Print.
692-94. Print
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Ejes Were Watching

HarperCollins, 1998. Print
Jackson, Travis A. 'Jazz Performance as Ritual: The
African Diaspora." Ingrid Monson, ed. The African
Perspective. New York: Garland, 2000. 23-82. Print.
Johnson, James Weldon, and J. Rosamond Johnson, eds.
Negrv Spirituals 1926. New York: Da Capo, 2002. Pr
Johnson, Patricia, and Walter Farrell, Jr. "The Jazz Poet
A Reflection." Minority Voices (Spring 1980): 11-21.
Kelly, Robert. "Jazz and Poetry: A Conversation (with Y
William Matthews." Georgia Review 46.4 (1992): 645
Lenz, Gunter H. "The Riffs, Runs, Breaks, and Distor
Community in Transition: Redefining African A
and the Jazz Aesthetic in Langston Hughes' "M
Deferred' and 'Ask Your Mama.' " Massachusetts
269-82. Print
Leonard, Keith. "Yusef Komunyakaa's Blues: The Postmodern Music of Neon
Vernacular." Callaloo 28.3 (2005): 825-49. Print.
Locke, Alain. "Review of The Weary Blues."' Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed. The Critical
Tember of Alain Locke. New York: Garland, 1983. 41. Print
Marsalis, Wynton, and Frank Stewart. Sweet Swing Blues on the Road: A Year with
Wynton Marsalis and His Septet. New York: Norton, 1994. Print
42
Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Lanmage of Langston Hughes. Lexington, KY: U of
Kentucky P, 1989. Print.
Moss, Simeon. "Writer Albert Murray Talks about the Blues, Jazz and Great
literature." Cornell Chronicle 28.9 (17 Oct 1996): 5-7. Print
Murray, Albert The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to
Aesthetic Statement. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Print
Neal, Larry. "Black Art and Black liberation: Takin' It to the Streets."
Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. Takin' It to the Streets: A Sixties
Reader. 122-28. New York: OUP, 2002. Print
Oliver, Paul. "Can't Even Write: The Blues and Eth

10.1 (1983): 7-14. Print
O'Meally, Robert G. The Ja%% Cadence of American Cultur

Print.
Patterson, Anita. "Jazz, Realism, and the Modernist Lyric: The Poetry of
Langston Hughes." Modem Language Quarterly 61.4 (2000): 651-82. Print
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life and Times of Langston Hughes. Crisis 109.1
(Jan-Feb. 2002): 22-28. Print.
Reilly, Charlie. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Literary Conversations Ser.
Tackson: U of Mississippi P, 1994. Print
Rome, Dennis. Black Demons: The Media's Depiction of the African American Male
Criminal Stereotype. New York: Praeger, 2004. Print.
Rowell, Charles H. "An Interview with Etheridge Knight" Caüaloo 19.4 (1996):
967-80. Print
Sanders, Mark A. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A Brown.

Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999. Print.
Review (Autumn 1997): 393-97. Print

Scherman, Tony. "What Is Jazz?" American Herita
Print.
Scruggs, Charles. "The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art" American
Literature 44 (1 971): 276-91 . Print
Thomas, Lorenzo. "Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown's Theory of the
Blues." African American Review 31.3 (1997): 409-16. Print
Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. 1988. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
2001. Print
43
Wallerstein, Barry. "JazzPoetry/Jazz-Poetry/JazzPoetry"??? African American
Review 27 .4 (1993): 665-71. Print.
Wellburn, Ron, "The Black Aesthetic Imperative." Addison Gayle, Jr., ed. The
Black Aesthetic. 126-42. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972. Print
Wild Women Don't Have the Blues. Calliope Film Resources, 2000. DVD.
Williams, Shedey Anne. "The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American
Poetry." Massachusetts Review 18.3 (1977): 542-54. Print.
44

43921799

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

43921799

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of

The question "What constitutes jazz poetry?" is a prerequisite to an

practice not only includes African survivals in African American langu

poetry is a form of music. . . . That's where poetry began; close to music,

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 17.1. 2011. Copyright ©

[t]he recent emergence of a younger group of Negro artists,

[t]he success of Hughes's blues poems depends on a self-concealing art Art

"The Weary Blues" (1923)

1 Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

"The Weary Blues" describes an evening of listening to a jazz

Hughes also renewed the possibility of enjambment by writing out his

I heard a Negro play.

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

The performer's ebony hands transform the white European

Exposing the multiple levels of blues identity that lend themselves to

Ain't got nobody in all this world,

These lines express loneliness as well as a momentary hope that troubles

I got the Weary Blues

This narrative progression from loneliness to determination to despondency

completes the ritualistic conversion from Black American suffering into

Rejecting the image of an abject individual moaning the blues, in The

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

As in the beginning, there is a conscious intermingling or merging

The rhythm of life

The broken heart of love,

Hughes's jazz and blues poetry called into question Harlem

The convergence between Hughes's techniques and those of the American

Engaging in intertextuality and Signifying on a grand scale, in 1958

Mingus does more than support Hughes's reading: he demands

Hughes thinks of his voice as making an equivalent contribution to

Sterling Brown's heart of blues

Around themes of hard-luck, desperation, ironic contrasts between the

Women of expressive voices as impelling as cornets, as subde as clarinets,

Albert Murray concurs with Sterling Brown's contention that jazz

As an African American intellectual in the early twentieth century,

In "Ma Rainey," Brown ingeniously Signifies on conventional ballad

"Ma Rainey" (1932)

Dey comes to hear Ma Rainey from de little river settlements,

An' some jokers keeps deir laughs a-goin' in de crowded aisles,

1 talked to a fellow, an' the fellow say,

It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night,

Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll

Dere wasn't much more de fellow say:

"Ma Rainey'"s four part structure suggests a literary counterpoint.

Comes fliwerin' in,

Line 12 emphasizes the holiday aspect of Ma Rainey's performances down

water, lak wind in river swamps" (22). There is a growing expansiveness t

Till Ma comes out before dem, a-smilin' gold-toofed smiles

The rhythmic character of the lines in Part II is more complex than

Stephen Henderson makes the apposite observation that

In singing "Backwater Blues," Ma Rainey is not just singing the

She sang Backwater Blues one day:

'It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night,

Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll

This description of how deeply Ma Rainey's performance has moved her

The trombone belches, and the saxophone

Muddy water, river sweet (32)

There's peace and happiness there

it is this aspect of the black tradition that seems capable of supporting a

Hughes and Brown ingeniously transform standard twelve-bar

Baker proposes that the improvisational forms of African- American

Poetry Signifies music and speech; black poets Signify musicians