Hughes may have named it this because the poem is about a musician wearing himself out by singing the blues and is from the point of view of a member in the audience listening to this blues musician in the audience. I also noticed there were quotation marks that maybe came from a song. When I looked these lines up I found that they are from an old song also called “The Weary Blues” which indicates she is writing the poem based off of this song, which was written in 1915. The blues was an African-American culture tradition and was a way of expressing themselves and became very popular. The word weary could be expressing the physical and emotional turmoil that the African-Americans have endured. These lines are describing the blues musician playing as it is capturing the motion and the rhythm of the music and the musician. Hughes is creating a baseline for the music …show more content…
The song is about how the musician is miserable but is going to put his worries aside. When we see the speaker go from trying to quite frowning to wishing he were dead we see exactly what blues music is. These lines are a trope to blues music as you cannot simply ignore of get rid of the blues despite your efforts to. Another reason for this shift is that the speakers maybe telling us that by singing the blues his problems are put to rest but resurface otherwise. The man is sleeping like a rock, which means he is sleeping so deeply that he isn’t moving. Hughes also compares him to a man that’s dead and this is a dark image when you associate with his simile sleeping like a rock. He did say that he wanted to die earlier but this is different. He could possible saying he is like a dead man because he rests in peace since resting puts him out of his misery. Concluding with the word “dead” leaves the reader with a darker feeling that portrays how the feeling of the blues is