Going back home. The politics of the blues in Langston Hughes’ "The Backlash Blues”

One of Langston Hughes’s very last poems brought him back to his origins, both poetical and political. “The Backlash Blues,” published in the collection The Panther and the Leash (1967), was immediately recorded by Nina Simone in her album Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967) precisely because she detected in the poem that interplay between the blues form and the rhetoric of political engagement which was at the very heart of Langston Hughes’s early career, and had been somehow abandoned by the poet after World War 2, and especially after his being investigated by the McCarthy Committee for his former Communist allegiances. In some sense, the title of the poem, which openly refers to the “backlash” white dominant culture is about to experience, according to Hughes, under the pressure of the Civil Rights Movement, is also a (not so) covert allusion to the need of both the poet himself and of the African Americancommunity in general to go back to their origins, rooted in that aesthetics of the blues critics like Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates see as the “matrix” of “black” culture. My paper will try to show the strategies Hughes deploys to make the blues politically relevant once again in the 1960s as it was in the 1920s (when Bessie Smith’s “Poor Man’s Blues,” the inspiration for Hughes’s poem, was recorded), and also to create a connection between the two historical periods when African Americans were able to obtain a central role in the processes that were deeply redefining US political and cultural identity.