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The Weary Blues (AmazonClassics Edition)
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 48 mins
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The Weary Blues (AmazonClassics Edition)
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Publisher's Summary
2022 SOVAS Award Winner for Best Voiceover Audiobook Narration—Classics
Langston Hughes was only twenty-four when he published his debut collection of poetry, The Weary Blues. The poems included here blend vernacular speech and musical rhythms to offer a bracing perspective on the African American experience. Traversing a wide range of settings—including the jazz clubs of Harlem, expansive natural landscapes, and seaside taverns—Hughes’s voice as a poet ties these various places together. The collection’s themes are equally wide-ranging: Hughes explores the depth of the soul in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the pain of endurance in “Mother to Son,” and death in the title poem’s haunting requiem for a weary blues singer. Taken together, these poems offer a singular expression of joy, pride, and anguish from one of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
Revised edition: Previously published as The Weary Blues, this edition of The Weary Blues (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.
What the critics say
“Dion Graham's deep, melodious voice and natural sense of story give this classic book of Hughes's early poems a revelatory power. His sense of timing, clear timbre, and syncopated cadence elevate this remarkably diverse collection. Voicing the poet's jazz style, Graham smartly hooks onto Hughes's musicality: notably in the jazzy 'Harlem Nightclub,' rhythmic 'Song for a Banjo Dance,' and in the dark ennui of the title poem.... Written in an often intimate tone, read with measured power and empathy, the audiobook ends too soon.” (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner)