Blues as Metaphor in Hayes and Hughes: A Comparative Study

Introduction: The Blues as Cultural Metaphor

"Blue Terrance" by Terrance Hayes and "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes both use the blues as a metaphor for human existence. The blues is a historically African-American form of musical expression that pairs sorrow with expressive music and is considered one of the greatest contributions of African-Americans to musical culture. However, the two poets employ the blues as a metaphor in notably different ways. Hayes uses the blues to express his own personal pain — romantic rejection and life's difficulties — though he clearly sees his attraction to the blues as a natural extension of his African-American identity. Hughes, by contrast, takes a more expansive view of the blues and sees all African-Americans as united within it. When he observes a solitary blues singer, he identifies with the man, and by the poem's end his identity and the singer's are united by the commonality of African-American sorrow expressed through the blues.

Terrance Hayes and the Personal Blues

The personal nature of Hayes's view of the blues is evident as he writes, recollecting his childhood: "That's why / the blues will never go out of fashion: / their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of / consequence; that's why when they call, Boy, you're in / trouble." The poem does not begin with a reference to music, but to the struggles Hayes endured as a young Black child growing up — when not even "buck-tooth" girls liked him, possibly because of his color, though not necessarily. The poem catalogues a series of small offenses done to him by the world: "If you subtract the minor losses, / you can return to your childhood too: / the blackboard chalked with crosses, / the math teacher's toe ring."

The poem also details the poignancy of Hayes's sense of lost opportunity: "I remember what the world was like before / I heard the tide humping the shore smooth, / and the lyrics asking: How long has your door / been closed?" The "closed door," or the sense of loss as the sea wears the shore smooth, is not specifically characterized as part of the African-American experience. Hayes claims the blues as his birthright as an African-American, but does not assert that all of his sorrow is solely due to race.

Blues are only obliquely used as a metaphor by Hayes, but are strikingly rendered in their musical quality by Hughes within the actual text of "The Weary Blues." "He did a lazy sway .... / He did a lazy sway ...." writes Hughes, using repetition to render the effect of the music in verse. As critic James Knapp observes, the poem "does contain some real blues: we hear it a few lines into the poem, when a line suddenly repeats itself, as the classic blues line does" (Knapp 2005). The poem becomes the blues in its sound as well as portraying a blues player.

Langston Hughes and the Collective Blues

Hughes does not speak about the music's relationship to his own life specifically. He is a relatively generic observer, in contrast to Hayes. Rather, Hughes views a Black man in the persona of a blues player — an African-American like himself, sharing a common sorrow. The man is playing the sound that draws Hughes to its tune, even though the poet and the singer have two different vocabularies, as manifested in the contrast between the singer's speech and the poem's own language. The bluesman is: "Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon."

In his poem, Hayes does not consciously come to the blues; rather, the blues comes to him. Hughes, however, seeks out the player, clearly because the music evokes a kind of primal memory or emotional response that resonates with his experiences — though he does not specify which ones. Hughes simply says, "Coming from a black man's soul. / O Blues!" as he listens, as if he instinctively understands. The presumed commonality of experience between Hughes and the blues player on Lenox Avenue is their shared Blackness, although Hughes does not identify himself as such within the poem. His intense emotional response to the blues, his appreciation of its beauty, and his apparent sympathetic understanding of the blues player all indicate that Hughes is chronicling the Black experience. In Hayes, this relationship is less direct; Hayes seems to suggest that he sings the blues because he suffers as all humans do, and the blues is one way his culture offers him to express his feelings.

Conclusion: Individual Melody vs. Collective Sorrow

Ultimately, both Hayes and Hughes draw on the blues as a powerful cultural and emotional metaphor, yet their visions diverge in fundamental ways. Hughes uses the blues to articulate a shared, collective African-American sorrow — one that transcends class and education and binds all Black Americans in a common experience of loneliness and resilience. Hayes, by contrast, claims the blues as his personal birthright but insists on the individuality of his suffering. For Hayes, although the blues may be African-American in origin, the singer who sings them is never universal in intention but always sings a personal melody.

Works Cited

Knapp, James F. "Langston Hughes." W.W. Norton & Co. 2005.