The Poetry of Langston Hughes 401classical myths but to a poetics of migration that had been used to impose
order on and give significance to the traumatic postemancipation experience
of African Americans, and that figured in many ballads, reels, and blues and
ragtime songs Hughes remembered hearing during his childhood in
Lawrence, Kansas.^17 A great deal has already been said about the
“modernity” of African American music and, in particular, about the
centrality of the blues to Hughes’s lyric practice.^18 Arnold Rampersad’s
suggestion that the blues poems in Fine Clothes to the Jeware some of
Hughes’s most important works has prompted a critical reassessment of his
project and legacy.^19 There is, however, much to be learned about how his
blues and jazz poetics fit in the development of the modernist lyric, both in
the United States and in Europe, and, conversely, how his engagement with
modernism contributed to his technique as a realist poet.
In his autobiography Hughes, appealing to the strength, humor, and
“rooted power” of the blues, tries to change the derogatory view of folk
culture that prevailed among the African American middle class and Euro-
Americans.^20 Ralph Ellison once described the blues as a “chronicle of
personal catastrophe expressed lyrically,” a mode of remembrance that keeps
the experience alive and also transcends it, “not by the consolations of
philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”^21
The artistic possibilities of traditional blues are examined in “Red Clay
Blues,” a poem Hughes wrote in collaboration with Richard Wright. The
lyric states, with eloquent simplicity, a near-tragic vision of history that is
tempered by a strong belief in the sanctity of knowledge. The first premise
of the opening stanza is that “knowing” history means knowing what it feels
like to long for the red clay of Georgia:
I miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
Says miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
I want to get to Georgia cause I
Got them red clay blues.
(CP,212)These lines suggest, with remarkable precision, the transition from
spiritual to blues, and from sacred to secular idioms, that took place during
the late nineteenth century. For instance, the syntax subsumes the act of
praying in an ornamental cadence (“Lawd”) designed to enhance the
expression of personal, daily needs. Despite the starkly conventional form,