loridness.The third major achievement of this poem is Hughes's mastery of nuance and control of language. He suggest the dialect without resorting to the contractions and so-called broken English that mar(k)s most dialects poetry and some modern poetry by blacks. Langston Hughes and the Blues, Steven Tracy's detailed reading and explication of Hughes's blues poetry, more than adequately defines Hughes's consummate poetic artistry. Tracy pays particular attention to Hughes's subltle use of puncuation, a subtlety that completey escapes most critics of Hughes's work. Although Tracy does not focus on the bebop aspects of Montage and does not address Ask Your Mama, this is nevertheless the best starting point for a literary appreciation of Hughes's use of music in his poetry. Introducing an analysis of the textual revisions that Hughes made as he combined the techniques of the blues artist, the blues composer, and the poet, Tracy writes: "The pervasive influence of the oral tradition in Hughes's poetry might make an examination of Hughes's revisions of his blues peoms seem like a futile, pedantic exercise, particularly given the variable nature of an individual blues lyric as the singer performs it. However, because Hughes was a literary artist, because he was tied to the written as well as the oral tradition, and because he made sometimes drastic revisions of his blues poems, such an examination helps to reaveal his attitudes toward his material as they modulate over the years and to illuminate the nature of his use of the oral blues tradition in his written work."There is an African proverb used to express futility: "like singing to a white man." If one is unfamiliar with blues culture, how can one hope to appreciate fully or expertly critique Langston Hughes? The establishment's critical diminishing and dismissing of Hughes is based, to an astoundingly large degree, on the cultural illiteracy and unresponsiveness of establishmen...
