Sometimes when we’re deep into a YouTube binge, we’ll come across a video that moves us, and compels us to watch it again, again, again. Today, we can’t get enough of this 1950s broadcast of Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” Performed as it would have been in the 1920s when Hughes wrote it, the piece is backed by jazz accompaniment. The writer’s spoken word lingers on warbling notes, transporting us to the Harlem Renaissance, reminding us of the transcendent power of music, and the tenacity of the creative mind.

As the rhymes and rhythms roll off of Hughes’s tongue, you can feel the musicality of his language in your bones. The world-weariness of the poem’s protagonist is equally palpable, and just as poignant now as it was nearly 90 years ago, when Hughes wrote it at just 24 years old.

Hughes’s writing often featured everyday, working African Americans like the weary bluesman in the poem—folks he described as “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters…people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.” Hughes considered jazz one means of resistance, calling it “the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”

Today, resistance takes new forms. But the creative spirit, as ever, finds a way to beat on.

Sometimes when we’re deep into a YouTube binge, we’ll come across a video that moves us, and compels us to watch it again, again, again. Today, we can’t get enough of this 1950s broadcast of Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues.” Performed as it would have been in the 1920s when Hughes wrote it, the piece is backed by jazz accompaniment. The writer’s spoken word lingers on warbling notes, transporting us to the Harlem Renaissance, reminding us of the transcendent power of music, and the tenacity of the creative mind.

As the rhymes and rhythms roll off of Hughes’s tongue, you can feel the musicality of his language in your bones. The world-weariness of the poem’s protagonist is equally palpable, and just as poignant now as it was nearly 90 years ago, when Hughes wrote it at just 24 years old.

Hughes’s writing often featured everyday, working African Americans like the weary bluesman in the poem—folks he described as “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters…people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.” Hughes considered jazz one means of resistance, calling it “the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”

Today, resistance takes new forms. But the creative spirit, as ever, finds a way to beat on.