The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (1926)

Late on Lenox Avenue, a piano man rocks back and forth on his stool by the glow of an old gas light, coaxing a drowsy, syncopated tune from the keys: "I got the Weary Blues / And I can't be satisfied." He plays until the stars and the moon go out, then sleeps like a rock, the song still loose in his hands. Langston Hughes did not write about the blues here; he let the blues write the poem, carrying its slow drag and its mournful repetitions onto the page without sanding off one rough vernacular edge. Other poets had been refining Black folk speech into something that could pass for literature. Hughes refused, and the Harlem street corner became, in his hands, a place of formal authority. This is the book where a soul grows deep as the rivers, and where a darker brother insists, quietly, that he too sings America. Read it aloud. It was always meant to be heard.