Langston Hughes’s Urban and Rural Blues

Abstract

Langston Hughes’s depiction of everyday African American urban life was an innovation in poetic content that received both immediate acclaim and condemnation in the 1920s. This chapter examines a less heralded feature of these early writings: their depictions of urban existence through the figures of recent rural migrants. In Hughes’s blues poems, the city is described often by people who live there but do not consider it home. This chapter argues that Hughes invented the new poetic form of the blues stanza to embody the continuing presence of the African American countryside in the modern city. It contends that, by devising a stylized Black dialect for both his urban and rural speakers, Hughes collapsed the distinctions between Northern and Southern experience, and challenged two prevailing notions: that folk speech was exclusively Southern, and that it was inadequate to capture the nuances of modern Black life.