Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening Proem prologue poem—I am a Negro Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa—Hughes spoke directly, intimately, and powerfully of the experiences of African Americans at a time when their voices were newly being heard in our literature. As the legendary Carl Van Vechten wrote in a brief introduction to the original 1926 edition, His cabaret songs throb with the true jazz rhythm his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy lyricism he cries bitterly from the heart of his race . . . Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal, and, he concludes, they are the expression of an essentially sensitive and subtly illusive nature.
