What does it mean to "have the blues" as an emotional state? In this poem and many others, Hughes refers to the musical...

Published in 1926, Langston Hughes 's first book of poetry
was entitled The Weary Blues.  Blues music is directly related to the African-American
experience as the blues burgeoned from the work songs of the slaves which had origins in
West Africa.  This musical form emerged out of the shouts and "hollers" of the field
workers and out of spirituals.  Later, with its twelve bars of notes of which the third
and seventh are flatted, the blues became a recognized musical form; and, progessional
singers who sand with bands sang of a range of subjects.  Some of these subjects are
natural disasters, superstitions, jailhouses, locomotives, and, of course, love. 
Unconventional in form and of a very personal nature, many blues lyrics consist of
three-line stanzas.  The second line of the stanza repeats the first, while the third
line is frequently a response to the first two.  This is the "call-and-response" form of
the workers. But, each song may have an individual form that expresses the strong
emotions of the singer.  For many the blues are almost a tangible thing.  Robert
Johnson, for instance writes that "the blues grabbed mama's child" in his song
"Preaching Blues." 

Langston Huges drew on blues and jazz
to create new poetic forms that expressed the reality and vitality of urban black
life. In his poem, "The Weary Blues," for instance, Hughes describes a night in which he
listened to a musician play the blues on Lennox Street.  In imitation of the
call-and-response of the songs, Hughes repeats lines such
as

He did a
lazy sway

He did a lazy
sway

To the tune o' those Weary
Blues.

Huges observes this
musician and understands the pain in his soul as he
notes,

He
played that sad saggy tune like a musical
fool

                 Sweet
Blues!

Coming from a black man's
soul.

                 O
Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy
tone.

Both the speaker and
the musician suffer from the depression that they call the blues.  Hughes's poem
expresses this oppressive emotional state with the exclamations and "melancholy tone" of
the music and of the poem as the piano "moans" and the singers utters, "Ain't got nobody
in all this world."