fences and ma rainey's black bottom august wilson

They couldn’t play the drums and couldn’t speak their own language. But the roots of the blues are found in the songs and chants of enslaved black people.Īs Harmony-based blues musician Eugene Morgan tells it, “The blues comes from the year 1619 in Jamestown, when the first slaves were brought here. Ma Rainey - one of the very few real-life people Wilson ever put into his works - released the recording of the song “Black Bottom” in 1927, when Wilson’s play is set. The scene and the music may just as well have been conjured from the Hill District of his childhood - a lively, robust culture in a community that was considered “the crossroads of the world” for black Americans. That is in itself a way of being, separate and distinct from any other. “Suffice it to say,” Wilson wrote, “that it is music that breathes and touches. He describes in detail what life is like for the “sleepy-eyed Negroes” from the South Side of Chicago, people who come alive at night, filling bars and juke joints to listen and move to music. With nine set in Pittsburgh and one - “Ma Rainey” - set in Chicago, the works chronicle the 20th-century experience of African Americans in the lyrical prose that brought him two Pulitzer Prizes before his death in 2005, at age 60.Īn essay Wilson wrote on “Ma Rainey,” included as a foreword in the Theatre Communications Group hardcover collection of his plays, is almost as riveting as the script. As filming begins in Pittsburgh on the Netflix movie adaptation of Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the late writer’s relationship with the blues is as relevant as it was for each revelatory release of his 10 plays.

Fences and ma rainey's black bottom august wilson