Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson
"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a play by August Wilson, is set in 1927 and unfolds in a Chicago recording studio. It centers around the renowned blues singer Ma Rainey and highlights the economic exploitation Black American musicians face in a predominately White-controlled music industry. The play explores themes of identity and cultural heritage, illustrating how the blues serves both as a means of expression and a source of strength for the Black community. Ma Rainey's perspective reflects a deep understanding of the blues as a vital connection to shared experiences and history.
The narrative also addresses generational conflicts within the band, particularly through characters like Levee and Toledo, who represent differing attitudes towards their African roots and the music they create. Levee's disdain for traditional blues and his desire for modern jazz arrangements create tension, ultimately leading to tragic outcomes. In 2020, the play was adapted into a film produced by Denzel Washington, receiving critical acclaim and multiple Academy Award nominations. The film's success further extends the themes of Wilson's work, resonating with audiences beyond its immediate cultural context.
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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson
First produced: 1984, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut
First published: 1985
The Work
Set in 1927 in a Chicago recording studio, August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom explores the values and attitudes toward life and music of the classic blues singer Ma Rainey. Their economic exploitation as Black American musicians in a White-controlled recording industry, as well as their inferior social status in the majority White culture, becomes evident in the play’s dialogue and action. As Ma Rainey puts it, “If you colored and can make them some money, then you all right with them. Otherwise, you just a dog in the alley.”
For Rainey, the blues is “a way of understanding life” that gives people a sense they are not alone: “This be an empty world without the blues.” As such, the blues has been a source of strength for Black Americans, and performers like Ma Rainey have been bearers of cultural identity. A major theme of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and of other plays by Wilson is the necessity of acknowledging one’s past and connecting with one’s culture.
Black American identity, however, with its roots in Africa and the rural South, is at times rejected by the members of Ma Rainey’s band. The pianist, Toledo, for example, points out the “ancestral retention” involved in the bass player’s trying to get some marijuana from another band member by naming things they have done together—in effect, an African appeal to a bond of kinship. Toledo’s observation is immediately rejected by the bass player, who replies: “I ain’t no African!” and by Levee, the trumpet player, who remarks: “You don’t see me running around in no jungle with no bone between my nose.” Levee also has a loathing for the South, which he associates with sharecropping and general backwardness. Levee’s disregard for Black American heritage extends to Ma Rainey’s style of blues, which he calls “old jug-band s**t.” He resents her refusal to use his jazzed-up arrangements and, at the tragic end of the play, when his hopes for a recording contract of his own are dashed, his rage is misdirected at Toledo, who happens to step on his shoe, and whom he stabs with his knife.
2020 Film Adaptation
While Wilson wrote his theatrical works specifically and significantly about the Black American experience, the themes contained within them were also largely viewed as universally relevant and poignant. In an effort to bring his work to an even wider range of audiences through the film medium, actor and producer Denzel Washington committed to an effort to adapt all of Wilson's plays, beginning with Fences, which was released in 2016. Washington then served as a producer for the translation of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to the big screen. Though released in late 2020 during the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that had led to the closure of theaters and the delay of entertainment productions, the film version of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom received a limited theatrical showing before it began streaming on Netflix. Overall it was well received by critics and audiences alike, with praise earned by its lead actors, especially Viola Davis as Ma Rainey and the late Chadwick Boseman as Levee. In additional recognition, the film garnered five Academy Award nominations and won two, for Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Bibliography
Adell, Sandra. “Speaking of Ma Rainey / Talking about the Blues.” In May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, edited by Alan Nadel. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Ching, Mei-Ling. “Wrestling Against History.” Theatre 19 (Summer/Fall, 1988): 70–71. The play goes beyond rigid realism by blending Christian and African cosmology in order to explain how problems and obsessions from the past must be exorcised by transforming mundane actions into allegorical rituals.
Crawford, Eileen. “The B-flat Burden: The Invisibility of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” In August Wilson: A Casebook, edited by Marilyn Elkins. New York: Garland, 1994.
Elleins, Marilyn, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1994.
Freedman, Samuel G. “A Voice from the Streets.” The New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1987: 36, 40, 49, 70. Sketches Wilson’s life, with comments by Wilson, revealing some sources of Wilson’s artistic attitudes and themes.
Glover, Margaret E. “Two Notes on August Wilson: The Songs of a Marked Man.” Theatre 19 (Summer/Fall, 1988): 69–70. Explores the meaning of blues music, as seen in its function in the lives of characters in Wilson’s plays, within contexts of black community and white exploitation.
Kauffmann, Stanley. Review in Saturday Review 11 (January/February, 1985): 83–85.
Leiter, Robert. Review in Hudson Review 38 (Summer, 1985): 297–300.
McDonald, Soraya Nadia. "In 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' the New Negro and the Old Collide." Review of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe. The Undefeated, 18 Dec. 2020, theundefeated.com/features/in-ma-raineys-black-bottom-the-new-negro-and-the-old-collide/. Accessed 4 May 2021.
Nadel, Alan, ed. May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Rich, Frank. “Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Opens.” New York Times, October 12, 1984, sec. 2, p. 4.
Savran, David, ed. “August Wilson.” In In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988.
Shafer, Yvonne. August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Shannon, Sandra Garrett. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1995.
Smith, Philip E. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Playing the Blues as Equipment for Living.” In Within the Dramatic Spectrum, edited by Karelisa V. Hartigan. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986. Examines ways in which the play is itself a blues composition of music, repartee, and story. The play provides an understanding of persons living at a time of “failure to understand the relationship of self to history and culture.”
Wilson, August. “How to Write a Play Like August Wilson.” The New York Times, March 10, 1991, section 2, pp. 5, 17. Wilson presents his purposes in writing plays that articulate black history and its contribution to the scheme of common human values.