Sometimes you start to write something and it grows out of control, like this essay. Still, I know there is something to it because poetry and music share genetics. The music notation images are kind of blucky on the Web, but if you are researching this topic, leave me a comment and I’ll send you the originals as a pdf.
Drummers and poets are used like ashtrays YES
–Howard Hart
A jazz poem cannot be removed from its musical context, and as such, mandates a musical approach to its prosody. In this essay, I will propose a terminology for discussing a prosody of jazz and examine the influences of jazz music on the form and sound of jazz poetry. To illustrate this prosody, I will introduce a percussive system of scansion that applies monotonic, binary musical notation to the lines of verse, thereby suggesting one possible performance. I will then apply this prosody to the works of Langston Hughes that exhibit three common jazz forms: the blues, boogie-woogie, and bebop.
The ease with which we identify a piece of music as “jazz” is not shared by its verbal stepsister. One recently standardized definition of jazz poetry as “poetry in some way informed by jazz music” is perhaps the clearest explanation available to further delineate jazz poetry from the broader free verse that emerged in the early 20th century (Feinstein 2). Anthologists argue that poems about jazz music or jazz musicians qualify as jazz poetry, and perhaps they do, but I would qualify that view: they are only jazz poems if the sound of the poems provide an echo to the sense of the music itself. From a prosodist’s view, it is hard to categorize a sonnet about jazz music as jazz poetry, especially if it does not differ in any rhythmic way from a sonnet about Queen Elizabeth. For purposes of this essay, I will consider jazz poetry as poems that sound like jazz through rhythm and form.
This concept of sound is important in fusing poetry and music together. Attempts to apply musical prosodies to other forms of poetry have failed for a variety of good reasons, yet the flaw frequently lies in the stringency of analysis. These prosodists use a musical scansion to impose a musical construct on a poetic form, “yoking them by violence together”; jazz poets, on the other hand, impose a poetic construct on a musical form. The rhythms, phrasing, and forms of jazz music are implicit in the work, sonically or textually, and since music is the form, a musical prosody is potentially more useful than others. Furthermore, in the poetry of jazz there is reason to believe that the poet has a certain musical rhythm in mind, and thus, if a musical scansion is applied, such an interpretation may benefit the performance and understanding of the poem. A chief aim of the jazz poet is to effectively capture the rhythms of the music he echoes. As such, a musical prosody should be the most revealing prosodic approach, much more accurate than foot prosodies, and slightly more comprehensible than the systems of Attridge and Cureton, though they could each be applied to many jazz poems.
It should also be noted that by the above definition many jazz poems could be song lyrics. For purposes of this essay, however, my primary concern is with poems that, while using jazz forms and rhythms, are not in themselves lyrics to a specific song, although they might lend themselves to this application. To a further degree, I will not consider the pitch of an utterance as a factor in this prosody. All prosodists seem to agree that syllables have a pitch, yet few consider it relevant to prosodic study. Pitch is not a model of poetic form, does not wholly concern rhythm, and is too subject to performative variations.
Under these conditions-informed by jazz music, sound equaling sense, form based on music, concern solely with rhythm and not pitch-we can capture the essence of a poetry that effectively represents the music it implies. Its sound is born of rhythm, its form comes from music, and its sense derives from the idiomatic language and social concerns of the jazz era. All three of these contribute to a poem’s jazz, and we must turn to African-American culture in order to locate its musical and poetic roots. The rhythms of jazz are the rhythms of a rigorous existence and are manifest in varied constructs: from the gospel choirs of the southern churches, to the field songs and chants of slave laborers, to the ancient tribal ceremonies of Africa where, not coincidently, they were preceded by percussion-pure rhythm. These rhythms and forms performed on European and American instruments gave rise to the jazz music we now recognize, yet the evolution has not stopped: rock and roll, rap, and country-western music derive from the swung rhythm and blues progressions of jazz.
Percussive Scansion
If, as we have said, prosody is concerned with rhythm and not pitch, then it would behoove us to simplify the systems of musical notation to accommodate this limitation. Fortuitously, a composer at some point decided to eliminate the multilinear staff for monotonic percussion instruments, recognizing the improved readability of the notation, which consequently removed all possibility of polytonic interpretation. This composer also recognized the binary nature of most percussion instruments, in that the notes are rarely sustained for any length of time. For example, when tapping a table there is no duration to the tap, and certainly not one tap that lasts longer than another. The table does not ring like a cymbal or maintain a continuous tone, like an oboe. Thus, the composer slightly altered the linear representation of beats and rests, much as is indicated in the music provided to percussionists in an orchestra. The following is a passage as reduced by our composer, maintaining the same rhythm but eliminating sustained notes and polyphony:
Unlike the human voice, but very much like a printed poem, percussion instruments have a binary (either audible or silent) system of performance, and a variety of possible notations that could all produce the same sonic result. For example, the two measures below, though notated differently, would each yield the identical result when played on a drum:
Not only would the above measures sound differently from each other if performed on the oboe, but each oboist’s interpretation of the same measures might also yield a slightly altered result. Even though the first measure of the phrase consists of a two-beat note followed by two single beats, the time at which an individual musician would stop blowing the first note will vary somewhat, yet they will all begin to blow the second note at the same time. This is not altogether different from the performative variations demonstrated by readers of English language verse, in that the duration of the syllable is not as important as the strength and distance between syllables. Since most percussion instruments are monotonic and binarily simplified, they are less open to variations of the performer. Even the intensity of volume is less variable, because a binary percussion instrument is unable to sustain a continuous tone; a single tone cannot get louder if it is not sustained. Though not entirely unheard of, secondary stress is uncommon in the percussive lexicon. In general, notes are either stressed or unstressed, which when combined with rests, provide the three types of musical pulse discussed in greater detail below. This does not mean, however, that percussive notation is completely devoid of interpretive possibility. As in a recitation of verse, variations in tempo and volume occur frequently, both within a performance and from performer to performer.
As with all scansion, this method provides just one interpretation, and as such, should be considered analogous with the usefulness of a musical score to a musician. It indicates the stresses, non-stresses, and pauses, and the relationship between them in time. Further, our scansion will ignore other indicators in a musical score, such as fluctuations of tempo and volume within the piece. These variations are similar to the deviation from one reader to the next and thus can be ignored in applying a percussive scansion to poetry. What the scansion does provide is a sufficient, rhythmic notational framework to ensure an acceptable reading by an informed reader.
The root of a jazz prosody must also derive from what one scholar calls “keeping it in the head,” bringing the musical tradition to bear on the reading of the verse (Dickson 30). For example, poets celebrating the improvisational aspects of the jazz form may use orthographic means to indicate a reading, such as long spaces at the beginning of a line, or words displayed vertically within a poem. This is particularly common in the jazz poetry since 1950, in which the poems are intended to be reflective of the emergence of a “free jazz.” Such a movement away from tradition is not dissimilar to the movement towards a “free verse” that preceded free jazz by 30 years. In other ways, a poet might use idiomatic language that is predisposed to a particular reading, or use scat language to replicate a familiar rhythmic phrase like “bop bop a rebop…a wop bam boom.” All these sounds combined with poetic images, like Langston Hughes’s hunchbacked pianist pounding his foot on the floor, are a necessary part of the assumptions and predispositions of an informed reader of jazz poetry.
Jazz Prosody
Now we turn to the terminology of jazz prosody, which in essence is to turn to all the definitions that have come before. In this case, the terminology must be made especially clear, particularly when striving to use words common to both musical and literary theory. As demonstrated, a prosody of jazz should use a percussive scansion to indicate a possible performance and to clarify a poet’s rhythmic intent. The easiest way to correlate the rhythms of music to the rhythms of language is to examine them through the terminology and function common to each.
Monotonic sound relies on three levels of indication: pulse, meter, and rhythm. Pulse is the most fundamental unit of measure, and serves as a constant current on which the utterances travel. A pulse corresponds to one syllable in length and thus its frequency will vary based on the overall tempo of the reading. The terms beat and offbeat have been prosodically utilized, but they can be easily confused with their musical counterparts, which are used to group pulses into equal, metric units and to differentiate a pulse falling at the beginning of the unit (beat) from one falling mid-way through the unit (offbeat). A prosodic pulse works at the level of a note, or rest, in music. As in music, poetic pulses may be designated in three ways: stressed, unstressed or silent, corresponding roughly to Attridge’s beat, offbeat, and implied offbeat.
Meter, the second level of indication, is a unit of measure resulting from grouping of pulses into recurring patterns, typically consisting of two (duple) or three (triple) pulses per unit. For all its emphasis in poetics, meter in music serves mainly as an organizational tool with which to make a distinction between pulse and rhythm. Meter gathers pulses and organizes them according to quantity and quality, number and duration. In so doing, it provides the basic framework of the music. Yet from a purely rhythmic point of view, the grouping of pulses is not important: even with the bar lines (measure separators), beams (horizontal lines connecting notes together) or words removed, there still exists a longer rhythm made up of pulses. Prosodic meter works at the level of the musical measure, though its focus is more on configuration (the quality and pattern of pulses) rather than duration (number of pulses within a given time frame).
At the third level, rhythm can be defined as a song of pulses, the overall conformance or deviation of a series of metric groupings from the predominant meter that occurs throughout a line or a poem. A rhythm consists of a sequence of meters that may or may not be the same as the underlying meter, which also allows that a rhythm may consist of more than one meter. At the higher level of phrasing, of the kind explored by Cureton, rhythm can also convey the progression from line to line and highlight conformance or deviation between line and stanza. At this level, rhythm stands in contrast to itself, which can be defined as syncopation, or what has unfortunately come to be known as counterpoint. (Counterpoint is a correlative of harmony, which requires the polyphony of more than one level of tone. We are concerned with monotonic sound in the study of prosody.) Rhythm works at the level of melody in music, in that when polyphony is absent, it serves as the next recognizable abstraction. For example, when we read the phrase, “shave and a haircut…two bits” and call to mind the melody implied by those words by an informed reader, we can remove the melody and the words, tap the rhythm on a table, and still recognize the phrase as an identifiable, rhythmic unit. Having attracted your attention, if I knock “shave and a haircut” on one side of a wall, you will likely provide the last two knocks of the rhythmic phrase.
As our terminology implies, it is the layering of rhythm atop meter atop pulse that provides the variations and forms from which music and poetry are constructed. Deliberately omitted from this construct are interpretations of units of poetic line or musical measure. These serve as an intermediate group between meter and rhythm, but need not be utilized in the scansion because there exists a fundamental difference between poetic and musical usage: measures for musicians are really a random, typographic, organizational convenience, while the poetic line, with all its syntactic value, is quite possibly the most important unit for the poet. As such, an attempt should not be made to indicate line breaks in musical scansion, and yet, a judgment must still be made by the performer as to how or whether to acknowledge them at all. In the blues poems below, lengthy rests have been left in the scansion between the line pairs, even though no performer would insert such a long pause in the midst of a poetic reading.
What must be acknowledged in a jazz prosody is what can be called the swing imposition. A swung meter results from a combination of duple and triple meter: duple in the sense that two pulses form the basis of the meter, yet triple because these are really two sounded pulses separated by a third silent pulse. The first measure below indicates a standard triple meter; the second illustrates the resulting duple meter after swing is applied.
This swing feel resulted from a simplification of the underlying triple meter of the earliest blues forms to two sounded pulses separated by a silent pulse. In essence, 123 123 became 1 31 3, the stressed 1 demanding a slight, additional pause before the unstressed 3. Herein lies the primary difference between jazz and the music that preceded it, but rather than being seen as something entirely new, it should be viewed as a blend between the two dominant musical, and poetic, forms of duple and triple meter. An illustration of this imposition still exists in musical notation today. Jazz orchestrators will frequently indicate the rhythm as portrayed in first or second measures below when they clearly intend for it to be played as in the third measure.
This swinging of rhythm opened up new possibilities for music, founded on the integration of duple and triple meter that subsequently produced much of the rhythmic syncopation in jazz music. The constant flux created by this integration also eased the ability of musicians to improvise, another important foundation of the jazz aesthetic.
Poetically, the additional pulses in each measure gained by the imposition of 3 on 2 offers the poet the flexibility to add more unstressed syllables between stresses. In this way, trisyllabic words can randomly occur within a primarily duple meter without the poet’s having to reestablish the emphasis of the meter later in the line. Yet instead of utilizing all three pulses within a meter, many poets deliberately elide trisyllabic words or phrases into two syllables, as when they change “I’m going” to “Ise gwine.” The use of dialect and idiom almost always helps to convey an intended rhythmic reading of the poem. Also accommodated by the swing imposition is the tendency of stressed syllables to last slightly longer than unstressed ones in general speech. This natural tendency, exploited by jazz, helps to keep the stress on the first pulse of a meter.
The importance of the swing imposition, and the freedoms it allowed to poets and composers, readers and musicians, had a large impact on the body of verse that evolved and the rhythms that occur in jazz poetry. This impact is particularly advantageous to a musical prosody. The detractors of earlier musical prosodies cite the mathematic precision of music as unfit for the less regular, temporal expression of verse. This is unfounded because variation in musical tempo, even within the same phrase or measure, is commonly used for emphasis or resolution and can vary from performer to performer. Other attempts have been the simplistic application of notes to syllables and the subsequent stringing of those beats together in a pattern. A far too common musical interpretation insisted that stressed syllables get one beat and unstressed syllables a half beat, thus implying a strict temporality that, musically or poetically, results in rhythmic chaos.
Yet to develop a jazz prosody, we too must propose a general formula for applying stress to a syllable, and for indicating the distance between it and the next. These too will have their exceptions, for the improvisational and loosely structured form will allow many independent variations. In a jazz prosody, prime monosyllabic words receive a stressed pulse and a silent pulse before the next syllable. Secondary monosyllabic words receive an unstressed pulse and do not merit an adjoining silent pulse. (The difference between what constitutes a primary from secondary monosyllabic word is similar to that put forth by Attridge, which distills down to the word’s importance as a bearer of information. However, this distinction is ultimately subjective.) Polysyllabic words give each syllable a sounded pulse, with one stressed pulse within the word that does not merit an adjoining silent pulse. Though some amount of intermediate stress may be evident, they do not meet our binary requirements, and thus all polysyllabic words generally receive one stressed pulse.
There are other factors weighing on the implementation of a percussive scansion. When determining where to begin the meter, or where to ascribe the first stressed syllable of a poem or stanza, there are frequently one to three unstressed syllables that precede the first beat of the first full measure of the song. These “pick-up” notes, as they are termed by musicians, are not unlike the appearance of the eleventh syllable in a line of iambic pentameter. For the poet, to split the word confuses the reader and could suggest a deliberate line break where one does not exist; for the musician, it can fundamentally change the feeling of syncopation or synchronicity. Also subject to interpretation is the total number of stresses in a poetic line. Sometimes the musical abstraction of the poem derived from a percussive scansion can help to determine a preferable number of stresses as suggested by the rhythm or form of the poem. But as we shall see in our analysis of the works of Langston Hughes, all these rules must be kept “in the head” and are subject to a great deal of variation and interpretation.
There are also similarities in form between jazz music and poetry. From the traditional twelve-bar blues to the more freewheeling improvisations of bebop, the structure of poetic lines and stanzas frequently coincides with their musical counterparts, the chords and the chord progression. Yet while there are specific traditions for each subgenre of jazz, there exist wide variations within each category. The reason for the variety lies in the improvisation that is so much a part of the jazz tradition. These parallels are important because they transcend the mathematical precision of music and poetry; they take our analogues of pulse, form and rhythm to a more aesthetic level.
Much as we have the three levels of quantitative structure-pulse, meter and rhythm-we now turn to the three levels of qualitative structure. Unfortunately, the terminology here cannot be common to both arts, for it is at this point that we separate form from function, scientific from aesthetic. The root of the jazz aesthetic lies in the improvisation inherent in all jazz traditions. Musically, improvisation can work at the level of the note, phrase, or song; poetically, it works on the level of the word, line, and poem. On the primary level, jazz notes, while the same as other tones, were imposed on each other in new ways, forming more complex chords, and pushing the expectations of which notes belonged in which chord. In poetry, this boundary testing came in the form of language, the idioms, dialect, and lexicon of the jazz age. The secondary level offers music the melodic phrase, which is placed over a sequence of chords. In jazz, this chord sequence is generally dictated by the form of the piece, but can change if a suitable melody is found. Poetically the unit of the line is the device that arranges the words in a rhythmic and semantic way. The ordering of words and the breaking of lines provide the dominant being of the work, just as melody provides the being of the song. Improvisation in both song and poem are expected, and in many cases mandated, by the form of the piece. On the tertiary level, improvisation works on music at the level of song structure. Although there are standard rules for song structure, the tendency of musicians to improvise through the structure led to the very boundary-testing that made possible the evolution of jazz styles, from blues to boogie to bop. There are similar effects in the tertiary poetic level, where the sheer variety of typography, style, and content of jazz poems indicates the poet’s freedom to improvise as well.
The improvisational aesthetic not only loosened the rules of what was already a loose genre, but also encouraged experimentation and evolution. It encouraged the jazz solo, a staple of jazz music in which the melody stops and a solo instrumentalist experiments with a melody of his own that both echoes and alters the original melody. Jazz poets enjoyed the same benefits. Free verse had already altered the definition of poetry, and jazz poets felt compelled to alter it even further. One way they did so was through the rhythmic capabilities expanded by jazz music.
Prosody of Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was arguably the first poet to bring the rhythms of jazz to poetry, despite the attempts of earlier poets like Hart Crane and Carl Sandburg who reference jazz music in their work without using jazz forms or rhythms. Scholar Onwuchekwa Jemie believes Hughes’s work represents a contribution to the effort in the early part of the twentieth century to free poetry “from the stiff conventions which Anglo-Saxon prosody inflicted upon it. His particular achievement as a prosodist (is) he succeeded in bringing into the overall poetic arena, away from the locus of sideshows, such forms as the jazz poem, the blues poem, the sermon, the gospel shout, the exhortatory call-and-response of black theatre” (196). Though Jemie seems to equate prosody with form alone, Hughes also introduced the jazz rhythms that are integral to the sound of jazz poetry.
Although many of Hughes’s poems are rhythmically common, stanzaic, abab rhymes, his poetic repertoire spans three dominant phases in the jazz tradition: the blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop, or bop. Each of these musical genres has specific forms and rhythmic conventions that can be simulated in a poetic context. Like no other poet, Hughes brings all these prosodic devices together in his work. Jemie also argues for “keeping it in the head,” stating that to fully appreciate Hughes’s work, a reader must be informed. In one instance he writes that some of Hughes’s achievements are lost in the poetry unless the reader “bring to them an active memory of the blues singer’s stage presence” including the mannerisms and voice of the singer and the laughter and shouts of the audience (45). In order for the poetry to function prosodically, the reader must understand the expectations of the form, yet one need not be a jazz aficionado to bring some understanding to the reading. Knowing even the barest amount about the blues, for example, can go far towards indicating an informed reading. The blues are not fast, and they subscribe to the swung meter. Just these two basic facts, one inferred from the name of the style and one from an acquaintance with jazz in general, are enough to get by.
Much has been written about how these three jazz traditions, blues, boogie, and bop, serve as a metaphor for the feelings of African-Americans throughout the 1900s as they attempted to become more fully integrated into the white cultural fabric. As we will see, the rhythms of jazz were more than metaphorically the rhythms of life. The poetry of jazz uses these rhythms to convey a certain energy to the poetry. If we are to draw parallels between the rhythms of jazz music and Hughes’s jazz poetry, we must understand the musical differences in the form. Since the blues is arguably the root of all subsequent jazz music, it provides a good point from which to embark on a study.
The Blues
Musically, a pure blues progression consists of twelve four-beat measures, subdivided into three phrases of four measures each. The first phrase consists of sixteen beats: four beats of the tonic chord, followed by four beats of the dominant chord, and resolving with eight beats of the tonic. This phrase repeats a second time, providing the fifth through eighth measures of the progression. The third phrase begins on the dominant for four beats, diminishes to a sub-dominant, passing chord for four beats, and culminates in eight beats on the tonic to end the phrase and complete the twelve measure progression. A blues poetic stanza also consists of three phrases, of long, rhyming lines, each of which are typically divided for typographic convenience into two short lines, which we will call a line pair. As in music, the first and second line pair are nearly identical, expressing the same semantic thought, yet commonly differing by the omission of a word or addition of an extra modifier into the sentence. This slight alteration is called “worrying the line,” a technique that introduces rhythmic variety into the second line, even though the semantic meaning is usually the same. The third pair of lines concludes the blues phrase and is often a semantic antithesis or resolution of the first two pair.
Beneath this surface comparison, there are other claims that can be made about a blues rhythm. When performed as a song, the lyric is typically concentrated on the first two measures of each phrase, the second two measures are usually filled by an instrumental solo, or improvisational re-expression of the lyric’s melody. Within these first two measures, the lyric is frequently imposed on the music in two segments, the first taking three strong beats, followed by a pause of three strong beats, and the second coming on beats seven, eight and nine. (The ninth beat, though beyond the two measures, does coincide importantly with the chord resolution on the first beat of the third measure. This importance is occasionally heightened later in the stanza by the appearance of rhyme.)
Within these parameters lie a plethora of rhythmic variations made available by the triple meter. There exists the possibility of from one to three “pick-up” pulses that can precede the first beat of each musical phrase. There is the performative challenge of the long pauses that occur on the third and fourth measure of each musical phrase, during which the instrumentalist may improvise. A reader or speaker of a jazz poem would naturally pause at the end of each line pair-indeed at the end of each line itself-but a silence identical to two lines being read would certainly appear too long. There is also a tendency to end the phrase on a stressed syllable, and the words themselves often lend phonetic weight to satisfy that need.
As discussed above, the blues feature an underlying triple meter and a relatively slow tempo, and as such, they allow a wide variety of possible syllables per line. A musical blues phrase contains 16 beats, nine of which are typically available for singing; the remaining seven are instrumental only. Of the nine available, the middle three are generally silent, separating the first clause from the second, which leaves us with six. In each of the six, sung beats, there can exist from one to three pulses, which permits a syllable count of six to eighteen. There may also be one or two pick-up pulses before the first stressed beat of the line, bringing the total to as high as twenty. This sort of flexibility allows the poet to produce one line of six syllables and another of 20 while still remaining within the rhythmic confines of the form. Rarely, however, does Hughes stick to a strict blues form in his poems. Sometimes he will omit the second phrase altogether, sometimes he will incorporate a blues phrase into a poem of an entirely different form, but when he does so, the blues feel is still unmistakable.
Besides being a prolific poet, Hughes also wrote a children’s book on jazz music in which he describes his interpretations of both the history and the forms of jazz music. On the blues he writes, “…there were croons, work songs, and field hollers-a kind of musical cry-whose melodies had a blues sound. The blues are almost always a sad song. (but) behind the sadness, there is almost always laughter and strength” (First Book of Jazz 18-19). On a more subtle level, Hughes alters the common themes of love-lost, loneliness, and hunger, and turns them into fervent pleas for racial equality.
Though “The Weary Blues” may be Hughes’s best-known poem, it is more a poem about the blues form than a poem composed in the blues form. Still, when the blues singer croons his song, the result is a standard blues stanza. (The full text of all poems quoted in this essay begins on page 32.)
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied-
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
The poetic form subscribes to the generalities above in that the first and second pair carry the same semantic meaning but “worry” the structure by implying the subject rather than stating it. The third pair serve as the resolution of the singer’s thought. The pulse is slow and the meter is the standard swung 1-3. We know that each pair ideally consists of six stressed syllables that correspond to the six sung beats of the musical form, yet the specifics of stressed and unstressed pulses are only clearly evident in the second pair. The additional syllables in the first and third pair make the choice far less obvious. As a polysyllabic word, Weary gets a stress on its first syllable, as does the monosyllabic Blues for its semantic importance. Three monosyllabic words remain, of which we cannot stress the article the, and so must decide between I and got, of which I would normally be the most important component. However, in this case I must serve as a pick-up pulse, occurring as it does at the beginning of the line, so got does receive a stress falling on the first beat of the musical measure.
A similar problem exists in the third pair. A first reading might be pure dactylic trimeter, but this would violate the blues tendency to stress the last syllable of the line. If we assign stress to mo’ and also assign stress to the first syllable of happy as a polysyllabic word, then we are left with one stress to deploy on either I, ain’t or no. Preference here is given to the verb providing the action. The last line yields seven monosyllables, of which wish, I, and died receive emphasis. The resulting percussive scansion would look like this.
While this particular segment of “The Weary Blues” is in agreement with the blues construction, the rest of the poem, while flirting with it, does not provide a perfect analogue. Many other Hughes blues poems consist solely of blues stanzas as constructed above, and our blues prosody would align with them in the poem’s entirety. Poems like “Midwinter Blues,” “Gypsy Man,” “Ma Man,” “Listen Here Blues,” “Fortune Teller Blues,” and others provide perfect examples of the blues poetics on which to impose a scansion, yet “The Weary Blues” additionally gives the reader information he or she might need to better identify the feel of those more rhythmically generic poems.
“The Weary Blues” provides an abundance of visual imagery to assist in our conceptualizing the blues poem and blues form, but it also indicates something of tempo and feel. The tempo is “drowsy,” but the feel is “syncopated,” not synchronous. The tempo is slow enough to permit “rocking back and forth” and a lazy “swaying to and fro,” and when he sings, it is in a “deep song voice with a melancholy tone.” The imagery Hughes gives us is of a “Negro” playing a “sad raggy tune” on a “poor piano,” sitting on his “rickety stool” and thumping his foot on the floor. The language serves a more than semantic purpose in the poem, providing both indications of tempo as well as the imagery that provide a context for the reading. Still, “The Weary Blues” is more than just a song or a musical style. The poem has its roots in the “black man’s soul” delivered with a “moan.” His crooning “far into the night” is indicative of the struggle of his race, and it may be until “the stars go out and so does the moon” before the struggle is over. For the time being, the only relief is to sleep “like a rock or a man that’s dead.” It is the weariness of the people that gives the blues its slow, melancholy feel.
Hughes’s poem “Ma Man” offers a purer blues form for examination, and highlights the flexibility of assigning syllables in a jazz poem. The second stanza of the poem, scanned below, illustrates this flexibility and some of the adjustments that must be made to conform to the blues aesthetic. The first line pair contains 13 syllables, the same as in “The Weary Blues.” The second line pair worries the first, but Hughes’s insertion of ellipses between the second and third plunk appear to suggest a longer pause, which has been inserted into this scansion. Into the last half of the third line pair, “The Weary Blues” places seven syllables, while the same section of “Ma Man” accommodates ten, provided they run together syncopatively as scanned below. The other stanzas of this poem offer similar complexities, and it is one of the most difficult to which a blues prosody can be applied.
Boogie Woogie
Boogie-woogie builds upon the blues structure and swung rhythm, but alters it in two important ways. Hughes writes, “‘Trilling the treble and rolling the bass’ is the way some players describe ‘boogie-woogie’. One hand makes the piano a talking drum. The other hand makes it a singing voice” (First Book of Jazz 27). A restating of this is that in this one instrument, one hand maintains the pulse and meter while the other uses melody to indicate the rhythm of the piece. Music scholars Nanry and Berger concur: “Typically employing a twelve-bar structure…boogie-woogie relied on a persistent percussive (repeated) bass figure in the left hand. In the right hand, interesting cross rhythms and melodic invention struggled against the steady pulse of the left” (76). Another characteristic difference between boogie and blues is the tempo of the music, in which boogie is played about twice as fast as a traditional blues, from 80 beats per minute in the blues (think of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”) to 160 beats per minute in the boogie (think of The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”). This doubling of the tempo, combined with the “rolling” of the bass, serves to produce a sort of rumbling sound, which changed the drowsy, lazy sway of the blues into the happy beat of boogie.
Rhythmically, the triple pulse that underlies blues still exists, but the increased tempo further deemphasizes the triple pulse and forces the meter to rely solely on the first and third pulse, which also serves to heighten the swung feel of the poem. The poet’s flexibility is also reduced by this near disappearance of the second pulse, since the appearance of three syllables in a row without a silent pulse would result in a virtually unprounceable line. A boogie rhythm is sometimes applied to a blues form, generating a twelve-measure progression or a stanza of three line pairs, but the increased dominance of the bass and the faster tempo increased the popularity of the four-bar phrase as the segment of baseline measure. This results in a four-line poetic stanza. The staccato units and sharp though predictable rhythms still make optional a slight pause at the end of the first, second, and fourth lines, with the third line typically running directly into the fourth. Most poems in a pure boogie form call for a rhythmically specific performance that attains an almost chant-like quality and precision.
One of the most natural boogie poems for study is Hughes’s “Dream Boogie” from his 1951 collection Montage of a Dream Deferred. Feinstein writes that the collection “pulses with the blues, boogie-woogie, brief riffs and longer solos,” and that “Dream Boogie” asks the reader “to listen with greater sensitivity to jazz, to hear what is beneath the beat-the dream deferred” (Feinstein 106). This change from blues to boogie signifies a much larger cultural shift, as African-Americans left the acquiescence of the blues behind for the political and cultural rumble of the boogie.
As in “The Weary Blues,” Hughes shares a little about the prosody of “Dream Boogie” through the imagery associated with its topic, in this case the cynicism of a father about his child’s facetious, jazz-age optimism. The “boogie-woogie rumble” is indicative of a bass part that provides a consistent, rapid “happy beat.” Hughes ends the poem with a common scat phrase, which in its standard rhythm provides a clue as to the tempo and rhythm of the poem. Hughes also begins to experiment with the orthography of poetry by using italics to indicate the father’s response to his child. In the second stanza, the father attempts to complete the rhyme, while in the third, he again asks his son to determine whether the beat is happy or not. The son responds in the fourth stanza by answering in the affirmative and chanting the scat phrase to conclude the poem. Hughes uses the boogie form to suggest that even though the beat is happy, those for whom the dream has been deferred are beginning to rumble, but only for those who “listen closely.”
In “Saturday Night,” Hughes does not lexically indicate the boogie form in the title or the body of the poem; however, the brevity of the lines and the predominant four line grouping, though not stanzaic in the strict sense, are indicative of the boogie form. Interestingly, the fourth group, with its scat language in the first two lines, adds an additional phrase, which is further complicated by its break into four lines. Like the evolution of orthographic italics in “Dream Boogie,” this extra phrase begins to suggest the evolution of jazz beyond the common forms of the blues and boogie-woogie toward the free-form stylings of bebop. During this period of jazz musical history, white dance hall bands led by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey Brothers successfully appropriated the jazz sound, which was seen by many black musicians of the fifties as bastardizing their culture and eliminating their chance to reap the financial rewards of jazz music. “Saturday Night” conveys this feeling by encouraging a carpe diem approach to living in the jazz age, as much as to say that one should gamble, have sex, drink, and dance because life is short, and “you’s a long time/Dead/When you is/Dead, too.” The last group of the poem tells people to have fun “Till de red dawn come,” and while the phrase suggests partying until morning, its allusion to the coming of communism, which will provide long-awaited equality and reason for living, is quite clear.
Bebop
Hughes terms bebop a “saucy, more offbeat than ever kind of jazz,” in which “clashing chords and dissonances may be more prominent than in older forms of jazz” (First Book of Jazz 55). As with the evolution from blues to boogie, the tempo again increases to a frenetic 240 beats per minute, though there are many more deviations from this normative tempo than exist in blues or boogie-woogie. One side effect of this increased speed is the complete loss of metrical clarity. In the blues or boogie, the musical beats were clearly marked by the drums; in bop, the drums left the time-keeping to the string bass and began to play rhythms that emphasized syncopation rather than maintaining the metric similarities. This disappearance of meter shifts the emphasis to the overall rhythm of the piece, and since there is not a dominant meter in which to ground the rhythm, much more of the prosody is open to interpretation. The pulse also changes-gone is the silent 2 of the blues triple meter, and since the tempo is so rapid, the 1 and 3 are closer together than ever, resulting in almost an equidistance that strips the swing feel from the music entirely. Instead of the rumble of the bass in boogie, we now have steady pulses that occur on each musical beat. It is at this time that improvisation becomes primary to the music, and to the poetry as well.
Hughes implements this improvisational dictum in both orthographic and sonic ways. The use of italics to indicate a change of speaker and the expanding of phrases in the boogie form are now commonplace, as are suspect line breaks and the disappearance of a single, identifiable form altogether. The first part of Hughes’s sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred is entitled “Boogie segue to Bop,” and the poems in this collection are indicative of the change in music and black culture. Feinstein writes of the musical significance of this progression: “…for many musicians of the time who were yearning to break from the traditional harmonics and meter of dance band jazz, but who had no established vocabulary as of yet, bebop liberated their hearing and their thinking with profound and immediate effects” (91). Put another way, with the jazz age optimism of the boogie wearing thin, and with the success of white musicians in what was a black musical style, more radical forms of artistic expression were needed.
It is hard to discuss bebop rhythms without hearing them. Because the meter is so flexible, and the pulse so driving, the time it takes to establish a true rhythm is increased, often spanning across poetic stanzas or musical phrases that pulse unceasingly for ten minutes or more. It satisfies our rhythmic desire for control only by its inevitable repetition, and the only way to truly ascertain this rhythm is to become almost entranced by the pulse of the music. This free-form style took root in rhythm, as Feinstein notes, “The bebop rhythm section furthered the overall innovation by replacing the established on-the-beat background (in which the bass player often restated the drummer’s beat) with more-syncopated rhythms that did not abandon the beat but rather emphasized the other rhythms inherent within the overall rhythm of the tune” (92). The rhythm and progressions of the song are really just a framework around which the musician improvises, and because the time to consider exactly what will be played improvisationally is almost nonexistent, the result is a free-form, unplanned flurry of sound. This places a much greater emphasis on the performance and the manner in which the text is recited, rather than on its adherence to any specific form. In bop poetry, this results in an increased usage of typographic tools that have little, if any, musical connection. We will examine one such example of each prosodic tool, sound and typography, in the passages below.
In “Good Morning,” the last poem of the Montage, the opening line duplicates the first line of the “Dream Boogie.” This time, however, the father begins speaking immediately and without the italic convention of the earlier work. Recalling his birth sets up a reflective mood in stark contrast to the happy beat of “Good morning Daddy.” Hughes sets up several rhymes, only to discontinue them, deferring our expectation, perhaps, like a dream. Lines 2 and 4 rhyme, yet 6 does not; similarly the rhyming pairs of lines 7 and 8, 9 and 10 are not continued with the subsequent pairs. Lines 18 to 20, consisting of solely one word or word phrase, convey the pause of introspection associated with “wonder,” “wide-eyed,” and “dreaming.” Lines 24 and 25 are indented, as if to emphasize their contrast to the welcoming the new immigrants expected. A rhyme is used between line 22 and 25 to restate this point. After a blank line, Hughes poses the question asked earlier in the Montage. This time, however, it is the father who asks, “What happens to a dream deferred?” The son responds in another echo of “Dream Boogie,” “Daddy, ain’t you heard?”
A percussive scansion of this poem would yield no definitive reading, yet using the principles that we have discussed in earlier portions of this essay, as bop composers used the foundations of the blues and boogie-woogie, we can posit one interpretation. While bop music is generally performed at a rapid tempo, the nostalgic nature of this poem would seem to counteract that tendency. The first line could be read identically to its reading in “Dream Boogie,” but beginning with the father’s voice in the second line, the pulse would certainly slow. The first three lines of the father’s speech are fairly regular, and the appearance of rhyme heightens that consistency. Line 6 forces nine syllables, which in order to maintain a regular tempo, would need to increase the pulse to a frequency that segues nicely into the two rhyming pairs which follow. From this point, it is a more frenetic, improvisational rhythm, and the disappearance of the rhyme serves to emphasize its rhythmic discontinuity. The pace continues until lines 18-20, which by their standing alone, force us to slow down the pace again to convey the spirit of reflection. The subsequent line’s use of the em dash and rhyme serves to maintain the slow, pulsing regularity. The last three lines of the poem are again echoes of lines found elsewhere in the sequence, only this time, the son’s response must be one of sorrow at his father’s naïveté, not the happy beat of the same question of “Dream Boogie.”
The following percussive scansion was produced in a uniquely electronic way. The poem was read aloud, at which time a drumstick was struck on an electronic pad that recorded the rhythm into a computer. Unlike other recordings, the data was not entered in any specific tempo, the notes were allowed to fall wherever the drummer placed them. When finished, the resulting scansion was quantized, which takes notes that may fall between pulses and shifts them to one pulse or another using a preestablished setting. The resulting data was then parsed into musical notation and the poetry added. Unlike the other examples in this essay that impose a poetic reading on a representative musical form, this example applies a musical form to a poetic reading. The resulting scansion, though musically complex, is an entirely accurate depiction of one reading of the poem. The scansion supports some of the general claims made above, including the pauses between lines 18-20, and the similar rhythmic notation for rhyming phrases like “out of Penn Station” and “tenth of a nation.” The opening line appears as notated in “Dream Boogie” while the closing line, also from “Dream Boogie,” is this time represented by a halting, more introspective reading.
Hughes’s “The Cat and the Saxophone” provides an orthographic example of a jazz prosody, and although this poem precedes the bop era, it does foreshadow the technique Hughes utilizes in much of Ask Your Mama, his most integrated work of jazz poetry and music. (Since Hughes specifies a musical accompaniment to this work, it has not been analyzed in this essay.) The use of all capital letters in the lines is at first seemingly random; however a closer analysis, and the mention of “Charleston” at the end, require us to rethink their use. The Charleston beat was well-known and performed to accommodate a certain dance step, and as such, there is little room for alternative rhythmic interpretations. The capitalized lines are indeed lyrics to a verse of a Charleston song, which is performed like this:
The interjection of the other lines seems to indicate a discussion between a man and woman at the bar, while the song plays in the background. It could be that Hughes was trying to indicate their simultaneous performance, but he did not choose to write them alongside each other, or even to use other typographic means, like indentation, to indicate their synchronicity. Instead, this orthography would seem to indicate a pause at the end of each capitalized phrase to allow the couple to have their discussion. The couple’s discussion is not rhythmically regular, and in fact, is broken by the capitalized lines not only between speakers but also within the comment of one speaker. In this way, the poem evidences a split poetic personality, with one half demanding a rhythmic, musically inspired reading, and another refuting such a reading. A scansion of this poem might specify the lines that are meant to be rhythmically regular, while also allowing the other lines to be performed without the constraints of meter. The result might be something like this:
As stated earlier, a jazz prosody and a percussive scansion constitute one method of interpreting a jazz poem, particularly as it implies a certain performance. This prosody relies on an understanding of the layering of rhythm atop meter atop pulse brought together with keeping the atmosphere of the music “in the head.” There have been few other attempts at a jazz prosody, and while all are well-presented, they tend to ignore the concept of rhythm that I believe is so fundamental to prosody in general and to jazz in particular. Charles O. Hartman’s work on the prosody of free verse, and his experience as a musician, would lead one to expect great things from his book, Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song. Disappointingly, Hartman’s work in this book focuses on the aspect of poetic and musical voice within an improvisational context and virtually ignores all talk of a jazz prosody at all. (By my count, the word prosody appears only twice). The work is useful in understanding some of the formulaic similarities between poetry and music, but falls short of examining a prosody that would seem to connect them.
Likewise, Meta Du Ewa Jones’s essay, “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality” is more focused on the orthographic representation of sound, particularly the way in which poets use typography and phonetics to indicate a specific jazz sound reminiscent of a particular jazz artist or instrument. No attempt is made to discuss the rhythm of the poetry itself, and as Hartman focuses on the sound of voice, Jones focuses on the textual representation of the voice.
While this essay does attempt to show the manner by which the rhythms of jazz poetry have been infused by jazz music, there is still much work to be done. Certainly the work of Langston Hughes provides a broad spectrum of form within which to examine the prosody of jazz, yet there is no one true prosody that will apply to all jazz poetry, much as there is no one true type of jazz. The very nature of the jazz aesthetic encourages improvisation and innovation, and the work of the critic trying to find abstractions common to both art forms is beset with the very problems which prosody itself tries to resolve. As such, there can be no one, true reading of a jazz poem, but by examining jazz poetry through the form and expectations of the music that inspires it, many similarities are seen. Though musical approaches to prosody may have been fraught with errors in the past, jazz poetry is well-integrated with its musical counterpart, and the music of jazz can tell the prosodist a great deal about the music of words.
Works Cited
Dickson, L. L. “‘Keep it in the Head’: Jazz Elements in Modern Black American Poetry.” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 10.1 (1983): 29-37.
Feinstein, Sascha. Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. Westport, CN: Greenwood, 1997.
Hart, Howard. Selected Poems: Six Sets, 1951-1983. Berkeley, Calif: City Miner, 1984.
Hartman, Charles O. Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Eds. Rampersad, Arnold and David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Hughes, Langston. The First Book of Jazz. New York: Franklin Watts, 1955.
Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1976.
Jones, Meta Du Ewa. “Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality.” Callaloo 25.1 (2002): 66-91.
Nanry, Charles with Edward Berger. The Jazz Text. New York: Van Nostrand, 1979.
Full Text of Poems Discussed
The Weary Blues
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway….
He did a lazy sway….
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Corning from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan-
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more-
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied-
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Ma Man
When ma man looks at me
He knocks me off ma feet.
When ma man looks at me
He knocks me off ma feet.
He’s got those ‘lectric-shockin’ eyes an’
De way he shocks me sho is sweet.
He kin play a banjo.
Lordy, he kin plunk, plunk, plunk.
He kin play a banjo.
I mean plunk, plunk. . . plunk, plunk.
He plays good when he’s sober
An’ better, better, better when he’s drunk.
Eagle-rockin’,
Daddy, eagle-rock with me.
Eagle rockin’,
Come an’ eagle-rock with me.
Honey baby,
Eagle-rockish as I kin be!
Dream Boogie
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a-
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath like a-
What did I say?
Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
Saturday Night
Play it once.
O, play some more.
Charlie is a gambler
An’ Sadie is a whore.
A glass o’ whiskey
An’ a glass o’ gin:
Strut, Mr. Charlie,
Till de dawn comes in.
Pawn yo’ gold watch
An’ diamond ring.
Git a quart o’ licker,
Let’s shake dat thing!
Skee-de-dad! De-dad!
Doo-doo-doo!
Won’t be nothin’ left
When de worms git through
An’ you’s a long time
Dead
When you is
Dead, too.
So beat dat drum, boy!
Shout dat song:
Shake ‘em up an’ shake ‘em up
All night long.
Hey! Hey!
Ho… Hum!
Do it, Mr. Charlie,
Till de red dawn come.
Good Morning
Good morning, daddy!
I was born here, he said,
watched Harlem grow
until colored folks spread
from river to river
across the middle of Manhattan
out of Penn Station
dark tenth of a nation,
planes from Puerto Rico,
and holds of boats, chico,
up from Cuba Haiti Jamaica,
in buses marked New York
from Georgia Florida Louisiana
to Harlem Brooklyn the Bronx
but most of all to Harlem
dusky sash across Manhattan
I’ve seen them come dark
wondering
wide-eyed
dreaming
out of Penn Station-
but the trains are late.
The gates open-
Yet there’re bars
at each gate.
What happens
to a dream deferred?
Daddy, ain’t you heard?
The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.)
EVERYBODY
Half-pint, -
Gin?
No, make it
LOVES MY BABY
corn. You like
liquor,
don’t you, honey?
BUT MY BABY
Sure. Kiss me,
DON’T LOVE NOBODY
daddy.
BUT ME.
Say!
EVERYBODY
Yes?
WANTS MY BABY
I’m your
BUT MY BABY
sweetie, ain’t I?
DON’T WANT NOBODY
Sure.
BUT
Then let’s
ME,
do it!
SWEET ME.
Charleston, mamma!
!