Tracy leads a blues band and has published books on the blues and on Langston Hughes. In the following essay, he offers his interpretation of the conflict between Dora Ellsworth and Oceola Jones, focusing on the significance of the blues in the story and on the meaning of Oceola's name.

In his short story "The Blues I'm Playing," from The Ways of White Folks (1934), Langston Hughes presents us with a compelling portrait of two women whose approaches to life and art cause them to sever a relationship that could have continued to be advantageous to each of them. In elderly white patron Mrs. Dora Ellsworth, who was based partially on Hughes's ex-patron Charlotte Mason, Hughes portrays a widow whose lack of fecundity, both physiologically and creatively, abetted by beliefs in Platonic and Manichaean dualism, leads her to exercise a Nietzschean "master morality" and to adopt an artistic...