Reading through “The Weary Blues,” by Langston Hughes, I definitely interpreted it as a slow, peaceful piece. There is a presence of a lot of long, dragged out “oo” sounds, so I got the relaxed tone from that. However, it wasn’t until I heard the piece spoken by Hughes himself that I picked up on the very depressing connotations of its content.  The first line itself sets the entire tone for the poem. Hughes writes “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,” drowsy is actually the exact word I would use to describe the rest of Hughes’ reading of the piece. He speaks in a slow and unsteady form.  Alongside drowsy, syncopated also describes the sound the poem makes as it is spoken. Syncopated means that the beats are displaced so that strong beats become weaker and the tone Hughes is speaking in is very weak.  Hughes maintained the same emotion throughout the reading, very slow, weak, and weary.

I also noticed that Hughes’ tone goes well with what he is describing in the poem. His tone also expresses a form of melancholy, a term he uses in line seventeen. Melancholy meaning sadness, he is definitely expressing some kind of mournfulness. Perhaps Hughes is using the sad pianist in the poem to represent his own self? The pianist “moans” his tunes about how he has nobody in the world, even wishing for death. So I hear it as Hughes heavily relating to this man’s emotion by “moaning” his own tune through “The Weary Blues” itself.