Session Notes on Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Syllabus
– Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982). Synopsis: Set in 1927 in a Chicago recording studio (the only cycle play not set in Pittsburgh), Ma Rainey examines racism in the history of black musicians and white producers, and the themes of art and religion.
– Court Theatre Company Study Guide: https://tinyurl.com/yc3c4w4e
– The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf pts 1, 2, 8, 9
– * My blog post has lots of good links: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/2018/03/08/some-links-to-background-material-for-ma-raineys-black-bottom/
– Ruben Santiago-Hudson Ma Rainey film adaptation screenplay: https://variety.com/2021/film/awards/ma-raineys-black-bottom-script-screenplay-1234895685/
– YouTube playlist (the Ma Rainey play list is one of the best!) : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXb3E8p4pv7MmgNPoDUlqCB7
Here is my most recent notes consolidation: https://raymondmaxwell.substack.com/p/fieldnotes-on-ma-raineys-black-bottom?s=w . I am re-working these notes to reverse the order, so you will see the work in progress.
Wilson dedicates Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom “For my mother.” When he first wrote the play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, he was working in St.Paul and making $80 a week as a short order cook for a religious non-profit, Little Brothers of the Poor. His mother had written him off, thinking he would never amount to anything. Ma Rainey was his first commercial success as a playwright. It was fitting for him to want to convey news of that final success to his mother in this dedication.
* * * * *
The most interesting and, indeed the most foundational bit of the back story of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is that in its original form, the play had only five characters: Ma, Dussie Mae, Sylvester, Irvin and Sturdyvant. The band members did not have an existence in the original form of the play.
That 1976 version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom actually predated Wilson’s first version of Jitney (1979). Uncompleted, it was stashed away. Wilson returned to the unfinished script in 1981, buoyed by his receipt of a fellowship from the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center and the subsequent completion of a play that did not become a part of ten-play Cycle, Fullerton Street. He added the four musicians, Toledo, Cutler, Slow Drag and Levee, reworked the play, and submitted it in 1982 to the O’Neill Playwright Conference. Then in 1984, the play was produced by Yale Repertory Company under the direction of Lloyd Richards.
In real life, there is no record of Ma Rainey recording music after her contract was terminated by Paramount in 1928, so we might conclude that in 1927, when the play is set, Ma’s recording career was already in decline, eclipsed by her protege, Bessie Smith. That might explain some of Ma’s monologues in Act 2 where she laments her treatment by the recording industry.
But back to the play. First, read very carefully “The Play,” a sort of prologue at the start of the play. I just uploaded the audio on Soundcloud here.
I ran a parallel group on Zora Neale Hurston just to see if I could find parallels in Wilson’s work. I decided I would try to identify each time Wilson applied folklore to fill in gaps in his narrative arc. And boy did I find oodles in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Which stands to reason, after all, as blues are just folklore put to music. Anyway, here is my folklore list.
The story Toledo told in Act 1 Scene 1 about the Lord’s Prayer.
The story Slow Drag told about Eliza Cotton selling his soul to the devil.
The story Cutler told about how Slow Drag got his name.
Toledo’s story/explanation about “leftovers.”
Levee’s story about his mother’s rape and his father’s murder.
Cutler’s story about Reverend Gates in Act 2 Scene 1.
So what constitutes folklore, you may ask? A basic definition may suffice:
Folklore generally refers to cultural expressions, such as narratives, jokes, beliefs, proverbs, legends, myths, music, songs, dances, costumes, food, and festivals, through which individuals and groups shape and disseminate a shared identity.
And why did I select these six particular pieces as folklore? When you get the sense that a story has been told over and over again such that all the listeners know it or such that it has acquired a mythological status, then for me, that is folklore.
A noted folklorist, William Bascom, who collaborated with Ralph Bunche on A Guide to West Africa and was himself an expert on West Africa folklore provides the following functions of folklore:
Folklore lets people escape from repressions imposed upon them by society.
Folklore validates culture, justifying its rituals and institutions to those who perform and observe them.
Folklore is a pedagogic device which reinforces morals and values and builds wit.
Folklore is a means of applying social pressure and exercising social control.
I know what you may be thinking. You may be questioning how Levee’s story fits any of the folklore requirements. Well, the thought did occur to me, what if Levee is making all this up? The telling of it certainly sounds well-rehearsed. And it certainly evokes sympathy and pity from all those within ear range. But what if it’s just not true? I know, it’s pretty cold-hearted of me to think this way. But I have seen people tell stories about their families that turned out to be lies.
Toledo’s “leftovers” story is a genre of folklore that emerges in many of Wilson’s plays. It made me think about Doub from Jitney during his military service in Korea, picking up the war dead after each battle and stacking them six high in a truck. Leftovers from battle. Which brought to mind a podcast I recently listened to, about the 300,000 dead from the Battle of Stalingrad, a type of inadvertent memorial to war. And we will see other references to “leftovers” in other plays in the Cycle. Watch for them.
All four band members are griots in the classical sense, storytellers, transmitters of the living tradition. Toledo was the head griot, a Master of Knowledge (as he shows us throughout many monologues), and his death at the end of the play is definitely something to mourn, the passing of a lettered generation. And Ma Rainey is a special type of griot, a master of the knowledge of blues. But Ma Rainey is hard on her proteges who do not worship her, disrespectful to Dussie Mae, and hard on Levee, and in real life, hard on her prize pupil, Bessie Smith.
Speaking of Bessie Smith, apparently the song on the rehearsal list, Prove it On Me, that Ma Rainey was scheduled to record, was originally a Bessie Smith composition that contained references to her and Ma’s “gender-bending” style. We also know it was through a Bessie Smith recording that August Wilson first discovered the blues. We can only wonder why this play focused on Ma Rainey and not Bessie Smith.
Let’s close with a link to the sterling voice of Professor Sterling Brown in his 1932 poem dedicated to Ma Rainey:
You can find the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47545/ma-rainey
* * * * *
“Somewhere a man is wrestling with the taste of a woman in his cheek. Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere the moon has fallen through the window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.”
Wilson the poet always comes through. Our first love. But Wilson the playwright is hanging out in the back (see Session #3 notes, where I extract Wilson’s philosophy of writing plays), along with his traveling companion, Wilson the pilgrim. It is the poet who catches our attention. It is the pilgrim who walks a mile with us down a long and winding path called Tobacco Road. It is the pilgrim I want to give my attention to here, and the road. I think August Wilson is aware, and is leaving us bread crumbs along the road.
We recall the thirty pieces of silver as the price Judas was paid to betray Jesus. Mark (the most authoritative), Matthew, Luke and John all have “Judas the traitor” stories in their gospels. More recent scholarship, however, suggests that Jesus and Judas, his best friend, worked out a deal and that it wasn’t betrayal as such. See “The Lost Gospel of Judas.”
But it goes deeper. Zechariah was paid thirty shekels of silver for his labor. He was then instructed to “throw it into the Treasury (Zech 11:12-13)” much like Aunt Ester directed her clients to throw a $20 bill into the Monongahela River for soul-washing services provided. From Zechariah the thread goes to Jeremiah, but it also becomes less about betrayal of an individual and more about spiritual community and religious society not living up to its promise.
We will learn more about this betrayal later in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Suffice it to say here that the studio executives pay out $300, $200 to Ma and $25 to each of the four band members. Multiple of 30. 30 pieces of silver times 10. Ma and the band exchange “their song” for a paltry amount of cash, and the record producers in turn sell records for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m going out on a limb here: for the record producers, it is just commerce, just business. Sturdyvant tells us he would rather be in the textile trade. But for Ma Rainey and her musicians, it is the transfer of a birthright, they are selling their song, something much more important, and for far less in monetary value. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in this regard, foreshadows the key element we are to come across in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,
“I didn’t know what I was searching for. The only thing I knew was something was keeping me dissatisfied. Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy. Then one day my daddy gave me a song. That song had weight to it that was hard to handle. That song was hard to carry. I fought against it. Didn’t want to accept that song. I tried to give my daddy back his song. But I found it wasn’t his song. It was my song. It had come from deep inside me. I looked back in memory and gathered up pieces and snatches of things to make that song. I was making it up out of myself. And that song helped me on the road. Made it smooth to where my footsteps didn’t bite back at me. All the time that song getting bigger and bigger. It got so I used all of myself up in the making of that song. Then I was the song in search of itself.” - Act 2, Scene 2.
The "birthright" betrayal within the aforementioned framework is not the only betrayal in this play. Sturdyvant betrays Levee over promises about his "new" music. Levee is also betrayed by Ma Rainey who, under better circumstances may have been a mentor and possibly even a collaborator. Ma Rainey betrays herself in closing out Levee's impulses towards modernism, and, it may be argued, every time she acts in a way that does not serve her own self interest. We write it off as idiosyncratic behavior, even queerness. Wait Ray, are you suggesting Ma's sexual orientation is a type of betrayal? No, not the act itself, but the flaunting of it may be considered a degree of betrayal of societal norms at the time. One by one Levee betrays all his fellow band members, ultimately committing the act of murder, the ultimate betrayal as Toledo is denied his livelihood, and in fact, his life.
The moral to this part of the story? August Wilson’s plays are so interconnected, and at so intricate a level, that one really can’t read one play at a time. You can watch one play at a time, and I guess we don’t have much choice there, but something, some meaning will always be lost.
* * * * *
I began with the boxed edition book, but it is so marked up with various colors of ballpoint point pens and pencils that I decided on reading a fresh, unmarked copy for new insights, perhaps.
The beginning, "The Play" shows Wilson at his best poet self. Somewhere I converted the whole thing to stanzas. It is epic poetry that Homer or any of those guys would find impressive. I'll see if I can find it later. Please read "The Play" closely, slowly.
In the opening scene, I was struck by Sturdyvant's staccato speech pattern. It reminded me, in fact, of haiku.
The three band members are introduced in Wilson's stage directions, as a sort of pyramid, with Cutler, the band leader and most sensible, whose playing is solid and unembellished, at the top. Slow Drag, at the pyramid base, is most bored by life and lacks energy. Yet, African rhythms are his foundation. Toledo, the other end of the pyramid base, is named for a famous city in Andalusia that represents Spain's golden age of religious tolerance across the three Abrahamic faiths. Toledo is the piano player who acknowledges that the piano's "limitations are an extension of himself." He is the only reader in the group, the only one who can extract meaning from written texts. They are all the same age, and there are suggestions they are all "buzzed out" on marijuana and booze throughout the play. There is intentionally no room for Levee in that pyramid, which is why Wilson has him show up much later.
Unrelatedly, perhaps, there is an unwritten rule in a Navy wardroom that when you arrive, you should remain silent for three minutes before joining the conversation, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. This is not a wardroom, it's a band room, but I apply the same unwritten rule because of my experience. Levee breaks that rule. Wilson calls him flamboyant with a rakish (dissolute, lewd, debauched) temper who "plays wrong notes frequently" and confuses his skill with his talent.
It also helps to know, in the decoding, that Levee represents, in archetype, Louis Armstrong, referred to as "the master of modernism and creator of his own song style." We'll come back to that later.
One study group member cited the similarity of Levee to the Hebrew Levi. I had to look it up. 3rd son of Jacob and Leah. Great-grandfather of Moses, Aaron and Miriam. Founder of the Tribe of Levi (Levites). Then it gets interesting. Levai, a Hungarian Jewish surname derived from Levi, gets modified to evade Hitler persecution. And where was Wilson's absentee father from? Frederick (Fritz) Kittel, who claimed to be German, would have actually been an Austro-Hungarian citizen when he and his three brothers immigrated to the U.S. in 1915. A stretch. Perhaps. Forward magazine published an interesting article on Wilson's Jewish "history." https://forward.com/culture/356896/the-secret-jewish-history-of-fences-author-august-wilson/
We heard all about levees during Hurricane Katrina. "An embankment on the margin of a river, to confine it within its natural channel: as, the levees of the Mississippi." During Katrina, the levees failed resulting in severe flooding of 80% of New Orleans, 95% of St. Bernard's Parish. That particular levee was the last line of defense against catastrophic flooding. Our Levee provides no such embankment protection, unless, perhaps, his physical self is our last defense against the severe emotional trauma that rages in his soul.
Also attaching an article from The New Republic, August Wilson’s Uncompromising Vision for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. (This is written for the readers of The New Republic and we know who they are, and who they are not! I am amazed!)
One more point to raise. No play in the Cycle, with the possible exception of Seven Guitars, has more blues infused throughout it. The opening epigram cites lines from Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Sunshine Special" (on the playlist). Ma Rainey's "Hear Me Talking to You" is memorialized in its entirety in Act 1 Scene 1 (on the playlist). Jelly Roll Morton's "Hello Central Give Me Doctor Jazz" is also in the first act, along with Blind Willie Johnson's "If I Had My Way." All on the playlist. And that's just the first act. In the second act, there are the complete lyrics to "Black Bottom," and a reprieve of "Hear Me Talking to You," both Ma Rainey hits.
Finally, here's a list of Toledo quotables:
"Everything changing all the time. Even the air you breathing change."
"I know what you talking about, but you don't know what I'm talking about."
"You gonna fit two propositions on the same track . . . run them into each other, and because they crash you gonna say it's the same train." (Sounds Aristotelian!)
"Everybody got style. Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end."
"Levee ain't got an eye for that. He wants to tie on to some abstract component and sit down on the elemental."
"Levee you worse than ignorant. You ignorant without a premise."
"That's what you call an African conceptualization. That's when you name the gods or call on the ancestors to achieve whatever your desires are."
"No eye for taking an abstract and fixing it to a specific."
"As long as the colored man look to white folks to put the crown on what he say . . . as long as he look to white folks for approval . . .then he ain't never gonna find out who he is and what he's about."
"That's the trouble with colored folks . . . always wanna have a good time. Good times get more niggers killed than God got ways to count."
"Some folks go arm in arm with the devil, shoulder to shoulder, and talk to him all the time."
"The colored man is the leftovers. Now, what's the colored man gonna do with himself? That's what we waiting to find out. But first we gotta know we the leftovers."
* * * * *
A few topics came up in our discussion today that were/are worthy of memorializing. I couldn’t resist going directly to the website of the Little Brothers of the Elderly, the nonprofit that employed August Wilson as a short-order cook during the writing of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
I had never seen the Louis Armstrong documentary, Satchmo, until it was mentioned today in our discussion. I found it on YouTube and will be watching it tonight. Eight parts, a bit over 10 minutes each. An added bonus is seeing a baby-faced Wynton Marsalis in the documentary, who I sneaked off my boat on a duty night to witness perform to a small venue at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, back in 1982. Also helps to further contextualize Levee’s character in the play. (Side note, check out Billie Holiday in segment 5 of 8. Oh, and the short clip with a young Dizzy Gillespie is to die for!))
I had also never heard factually that they eliminated cocaine from the Coca-Cola recipe in 1929, two years after this play we set. So in addition to the band members passing around booze and marijuana, we have Ma Rainey making a big deal about getting her cocaine dosage via Coca-Cola. As a side note, my brother-in-law in Guinea-Bissau says he had relatives in then Portuguese Guinea who provided cola nut shipments to the Coca-Cola folks in Atlanta.
The idea that both Ma Rainey and Levee served as “levees” was a thought that resonated with me, Ma Rainey holding back the tide of commercialized distribution of her music while simultaneously breaking down the walls of polite expectations of blues diva sexuality at the time. Meanwhile, Levee provided his own type of embankment, containing within his person as long as he was able the severe traumatization he claimed he experienced in his youth.
* * * * *
There is a lot to be said for splitting off August Wilson the pilgrim, on his own very unique development path, from August Wilson the poet taking us on a tour of the world he envisioned and imagined. See my notes from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone for a fuller discussion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the idea, informed by Victor Frankl, that self-actualization is not the top of the pyramid at all. It turns out that self-transcendence trumps self-actualization any day of the week and twice on Sundays, as explicitly stated in Maslow’s late works. The most recent scholarship points out the Blackfoot roots underpinning Maslow’s work and how Maslow got it wrong, for the most part. We can feel Wilson nudging us in that direction, especially in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. A bit of foreshadowing of my own, no doubt.
A final word. We have much to learn from what I call the “dual-directional influence” of August Wilson with regard to his forerunners and successors in the world of drama composition and production. Patrick Maley makes the case that we have a better understanding of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller after reading August Wilson than before and that each one informs and amplifies the other. The same can be said of many of Wilson’s contemporaries in the arts, including Toni Morrison and others. We will begin next Sunday with a look at many of August Wilson’s influences.
* * * * *
Three things you may have missed if you only watched the movie.
What was up with the card trick Slow Drag was so anxious to show his fellow band members in Act #2?
The card trick Slow Drag was so anxious to show the band members was a basic one: you draw a card out of a deck face down, return the card, and the person holding the deck tells you what card you drew out. I’ve seen people play the trick, though I do not know myself how to do it or how it is done. What is significant here is that Toledo drew the six of diamonds.
So I did a search on “six of diamonds.”
“The six of diamonds refers to a loss or the absence of someone. It refers to an empty space. In its occult dimensions, this card refers to losing something that seemed established. Next to the hearts, the six of diamonds refers to a romantic problem, such as losing your loved-one linked to a break-up or a form of betrayal.”
Here August Wilson is using a technique he attributes to Borges’ magical realism. He is telling, though the mechanism of the card trick and the fact that is is Toledo who drew the six of diamonds, that Toledo is going to die. So at perhaps a subconscious level, we know that Toledo is the one to die, but we don’t know how. How, it turns out is at the hand of Levee, but only after Levee suffers one more humiliation at the hands of the white manager, reinforced by one more humiliation when Toledo inadvertently steps on Levee’s new shoes. Levee, the antihero, traumatized as a child, goes into a blind rage and acts out against the most vulnerable, his fellow band member. A tragedy for Toledo, for Levee, and for the band as a whole.
Levee the tortured genius and his parallel to the emergence of Impressionism in Art.
We know from the stage directions of Levee’s entry that he is younger than the other men, that he is flamboyant but it may be subtle and sneak up on you, that his temper is rakish (having or displaying a dashing, jaunty, or slightly disreputable quality or appearance) and bright, that he “lacks fuel for himself and is somewhat of a buffoon,” that his buffoonery can be intelligent and “calculated to shift control of the situation to his grasp,” and finally, that he often confuses his skill with his talent (‘Talent’ is something that one is born with; it is your natural ability to do something without really thinking about it. ‘Skill’, on the other hand, is something that you acquire after putting in a lot of hard work; unlike talent, it is not inborn, but learned). We also know that Levee claimed to have experienced the brutal rape of his mother and the murder of his father at a very young and tender age. You can tell by the way Levee loses his cool at inappropriate times that he is still working through the traumatization of his youth.
All that aside, Levee knows how to write music, even though he is otherwise illiterate, and Levee has stumbled upon a new way of composing music, similar to how a few French painters stumbled upon a new way to paint. But much like the French painters of the late 1800’s, traditional practitioners rejected the innovations, referring to it not as painting but as an “impression of painting.” Ma said of Levee, “You play ten notes for everyone you supposed to play. It don’t call for that.” “You ain’t supposed to go off by yourself and play what you want.” “You call yourself playing music.”
“The early Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music and impressionist literature.”
The new style was characterized “small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities.” Its competition was photography, and it sought, like photography, in one sitting, to capture the lighting effects of the new medium while retaining the “sketchy” elements of landscape painting. Initially rejected by art critics, it soon became the standard with such names as Monet, Renoir, Manet, Degas, and later, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and others.
Similarly, Levee’s idea of “too many notes” and “variation on a theme” became the standard for blues, jazz, and even classical music of the period and beyond, most notably Ravel and Debussy in classical music and Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, et al., in jazz music.
The Cult value of Ma vs. the Exhibition value of Levee and why the play is named for Ma Rainey and not for Levee Green.
In a way related to #2 above, we see played out the juxtaposition of Ma’s live performance blues, honed and sharpened on the road, at county fairs and in city honky tonks, and now being subjected to mechanical reproduction for commercial purposes, and Levee’s new music, that perhaps lends itself to even greater profits through the mechanical reproduction it was, perhaps, designed to eventually succeed at.
It also follows somewhat the Walter Benjamin distinction of cult value art, designed for ritualistic observance in the performance of magic rites and ceremonies, contrasted with mechanically produced exhibition value art, whether music or paintings, that is separated from ritual and magic via reproduction, and hence more accessible to greater numbers of people. It may be argued that the cult value will always be of higher quality because it exists in service to higher powers, to magic, to ritual, where the exhibition value art exists solely to satisfy the commercial profit motive.
* * * * *
“The Play” stands out as one of the great introductions in the Cycle series and an excellent example of August Wilson’s talent and skill as a poet. It describes 1927 Chicago and its residents graphically and with deep feeling, so much so that one wonders why anyone might still call the plays the Pittsburgh series. Of course, we know why, every other play is set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. But with Ma Rainey, Wilson makes a statement that he is not owned by Pittsburgh or any other geographic location.
His description touches on a broad cross section of society’s inner city, the crooked and the straight, yet he leaves space in the imagination of the reader with his haunting “somewhere” alliteration: a man wrestling with the taste of a woman in his mouth; a dog barking; the fallen moon breaking into 30 pieces of silver. Thirty pieces of silver suggests betrayal, the denial of Peter, and in Exodus, the price of a slave.
The passage is also reminiscent of the poetry of Frank O’Hara, especially The Day Lady Died, do this and do that, a list of descriptive everyday activities. Surely Wilson must have been familiar with O’Hara during his poet days in the 60’s.
He closes with a reference to being both a victim and the ten thousand slain. There is the ten thousand in Xenophon’s Anabasis, ten thousand mercenaries who marched from the Mediterranean to Persia, but most of them lived. There is a ten thousand slain reference in Romeo and Juliet. There is the biblical reference of David’s slain ten thousand. We have many choices.
The epigram, a Blind Lemon Jefferson song lyric, is significant in the similarities between Jefferson’s career and Ma Rainey’s. Called “the Father of the Texas Blues,” Jefferson was one of the first solo guitarists to achieve monetary success as a commercial performer. The whole song is on the YouTube playlist.
We have discussed Levee in previous sessions. There’s always more to say about Levee. He’s an anti-hero, brash, impolite, un-endearing, tragic, but central to the plot. In fact, the play could have easily been called the Adventures of Levee Green but it wouldn’t have made any money!
Levee was traumatized as a child and once we learn about it our hearts pour out for him. But Levee refused to live by the rules, and he met a tragic end. From the music side, Levee saw himself as a modernist, breaking away from the old restrictive bonds. He was the archetypal Louis Armstrong, who also played for Ma Rainey as a young man. But he couldn’t get along with anybody, not Ma, not his fellow band members, not even Sturdyvant. I think Levee was deeply unhappy. Authentic but deeply unhappy.
Levee refers to himself in the third person. Illeism. He tells his fellow band members, “Ain’t nothing gonna happen to Levee. Levee ain’t gonna let nothing happen to him.” He is stepping outside of himself, outside his own tragic story. At the same time, he is beginning to establish his brand. Later in the same scene, Levee proclaims, “I’m Levee. Just me. I ain’t no imitation nothing!” And further qualifies, “I ain’t no imitation white man. And I don’t want to be no white man.” Definitely the anti-hero.
Slow Drag, Cutler, Toledo, are all great characters. I would have liked to hang out with such a crew. Although a tragedy, reading Ma Rainey always lifts my spirits. I have more margin notes in Ma Rainey than in any other play in the series.
* * * * *
Addendum: Some thoughts on Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Ma Rainey is set in a combined recording studio and band room. The story being told is primarily about music and its reproducibility for the mass market. Ma repeatedly makes the distinction between the people who may buy records and her fans on the road, with a decided preference for the later. Ma says, “I ain’t playing with you, Irvin. I can walk out of here and go back to my tour. I don’t need to go through all this.” Later she says, “What I care about Bessie? I don’t care if she sell a million records. She got her people and I got mine. I don’t care what nobody else do. Ma was the first and don’t you forget it.”
Benjamin distinguishes between live art that served a purpose in magic and religious rituals, and mechanically reproduced art that “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Many years ago I saw a jazz group, Spyrogyra, in their early days, perform in a venue in Providence, Rhode Island that was not much larger than a very large living room. Prior, I had only heard their music on cassette tape. There was magic and an energy exchange ritual between performers and observers in that living room that could never be replicated with the finest of recording devices.
The same thing happened when I went to a very young Wynton Marsalis concert in a tiny auditorium at Old Dominion University after only having heard his music emitted via speakers and a turntable. Emancipating a work of art from dependence on ritual has its place, but the experience is just not the same.
Ma says, “White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out (exhibition value) but they don’t know how it got there (cult value). They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better (again, exhibition value). You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life (cult value).”
Benjamin cites two planes on which works of art are received and valued, the cult value where artistic production connects to ritual artifacts that serve a limited cult of elite observers, versus the exhibition value where art practices are freed from ritual with increased opportunities for “distribution.”
A “meta”- example that the play demonstrates is the distinction between seeing a play performed on a stage versus seeing it as a movie, performed on a screen. There is an interaction on the stage, and an energy exchange that flows off the stage into the playhouse that you just don’t get watching a film. There are, however, degrees of freedom granted to the film director and the cinematographer that do not exist for the stage director. And vice versa. And animation takes film direction to an all new height, I suppose.
* * * * *
Some interesting tidbits from the Sandra Shannon interview with August Wilson on Ma Rainey.
Broadway producers offered Wilson $25,000 for his play but with no creative direction. They wanted to turn it into a musical. Although Wilson was only making $85 per week as a short order cook at the time, he rejected the offer. Then he contacted Lloyd Richards at Yale Rep, who gave him full artistic direction.
The key actor in the first Broadway production of Ma Rainey, Theresa Merritt, was locked out of her hotel room during the production because she insisted on paying weekly for her hotel room instead of night to night. She moved to the Hilton, where she found flowers and fruit in her room.
The cast arrived at Manhattan Records to record Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the production. The producer met them and said, “You boys come on in. I’ve got sandwiches for you.” This was 1985. But just like in the 1927 play, Theresa was late, and when she arrived, she complained about the heat in the studio. The heat never came up. They recorded in their coats.
* * * * *
Who’s in charge? I counted 17 places in the text, six before Ma arrives, where Cutler and Slow Drag (and Ma) form a sort of Greek chorus to reinforce Ma’s authority over the music and how it is to be played. Cutler and Slow Drag are true believers. Toledo has a different role, a seer, a griot, somewhat detached. Levee has a moment of lucidity and makes a valid point (I think) when he says,
“Ma’s the boss on the road! We at a recording session. Mr. Sturdyvant and Mr. Irvin say what’s gonna be here! We in Chicago, we ain’t in Memphis!”
The original play did not include the band members at all. They were added later and located downstairs in the band room, where the two violent altercations occur. It may be a subtle hint pointing us to the oldest known piece of literature produced by an African American, Bars Fight, by Lucy Terry, a freed African in Massachusetts in 1746.
* * * * *
Post discussion notes.
The unsympathetic nature of the diva Ma Rainey, who stole the blues from another, was dismissive of her protege, Dussie, and allowed if not precipitated Levee’s going over the deep edge.
Was Toledo a Garveyite? Or maybe a Moor Scientist follower of Noble Drew Ali? That may explain his political and philosophical positions. But why did he have to die? Why was his death meaningful to the telling of the story? We will see another manifestation of death’s symbolism in Two Trains Running, in Seven Guitars, and in King Hedley II.
The musicality of the Reverend Gates ritual story that all the band members obviously already knew, is drawn out over several pages to relieve the tension of the story being told. Definitely folkloric.
We see Wilson’s skill in providing us mental space for the absorption of difficult messages.
Ma and her demand for Coca Cola and the memorialization of the beverage (and the drug from which it was derived) in the script.
The ensemble’s string quartet musicality and give-and-take regarding the character of Sylvester and his performance on the stage.
The marriage of the horn and the voice once the horn arrived. Early blues just had chords on a guitar.
* * * * *
There are at least two plays in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. There is the superficial plot of the play – a Ma Rainey recording session that ends in the production of a record by the star and a tragic act committed among the band players. And there are several meta-plays that the playwright and all the characters both generate and represent between the lines. Let’s talk about the first, then the second.
Deep inside Act 1, after meeting all the band members and the staff of the recording company and learning through their “locker room talk” what makes them tick as individuals, Ma finally arrives with her girlfriend and her stuttering nephew and a police officer in tow. There’s been a traffic altercation that gets fixed with a small side payment.
The recording session, already behind schedule, gets further delayed as Ma (1) insists on getting a soft drink from outside the studio, and (2) insists that the band will do multiple takes until her stuttering nephew can get the voice introduction to her hit song right. Once the recording session is complete, or so we think, the recording crew discovers that a microphone was disconnected. So they have to do it one more time. Once completed, Ma refuses to sign the release, though after a short period of protestation, she signs and departs.
And then the fun begins. In the sub-play, Levee (Levi, Louis Armstrong) the trumpet player, fired by Ma for being a hot shot (and for making overtures to Ma’s girlfriend), has been working a side deal with the record producer to produce his own band. The producer at length rejects Levee’s recording proposal, but offers him $5 for the score and “his troubles.” Levee feels dejected and disappointed and carries those feelings back to the band room, whereupon, he gets involved in a final altercation with Toledo, the piano player, resulting in what appears to be Toledo’s death by stabbing. As the curtain falls the sound of Levee’s trumpet is heard.
OK. An alternate perspective. Or several.
The “real” play is a series of representations. There is the waiting game that Professor Shannon writes about. Waiting for Ma to show up late. Waiting for the policeman to get his bribe. Waiting for Ma to get her Coke. The band members waiting for their alcohol and marijuana high to kick in. Waiting for Sylvester, the stutterer to get his part right and without repetitions. Waiting for Levee to make his move on Dussie. Waiting for the microphone to get fixed so they can do one more take. Waiting for Slow Drag to finish his card trick. Waiting for Ma to sign the release. Waiting for Toledo to die. Professor Shannon writes about “The Long Wait” in Ma Rainey, linking it to African Americans’ long wait for freedom.
Professor Nadel writes about the metaphor of making the record, that is to say, writing the history. Wilson has written words to the effect that the blues contains history, philosophy, psychology and cosmology. But what distinguishes the performed blues of Ma with her fans on the road from the mechanically reproduced blues distributed by the recording company? If you’ve ever been to a live concert or a blues club the size of a large living room, you know the answer to that question.
Finally (or perhaps not but this discussion can’t go on forever!), remember, they (the New York/Broadway establishment) offered Wilson $25,000 for this play, but with no artistic direction on his part. They wanted to make it into a musical. In the end, Wilson rejected their offer (even though he was only making $80 a week as a short order cook) and forged the relationship with Lloyd Richards and the Yale Rep that preserved his artistic freedom.
* * * * *
Principles of Composition
In a meta sense (I propose that poets and playwrights tell three stories: the autobiographic (about their lives); the ethnographic (about their immediate environments); and the meta-poetic (about their experience with the process of writing itself)), I hear August Wilson’s voice talking about writing and producing plays throughout this play.
Stretch your imagination. In the character of the intellectual, Toledo (“Everything changing all the time. Even the air you breathing change.” And “Levee ain’t got an eye for that. He wants to tie on to some abstract component and sit down on the elemental.” And “That’s what you call an African conceptualization. That’s when you name the gods or call on the ancestors to achieve whatever your desires are.”).
In the character of the band leader, Cutler (“We ain’t talking about the paper. We talking about you understanding where you fit in when you around here. You just play what I say.” and ” Levee’s confused about who the boss is. He don’t know Ma’s the boss.” And “You plays the piece. . . Whatever they want! Ma says what to play! Not you! You ain’t here to be doing no creating.”)
And, yes, in the character of Ma, the diva herself (“White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.” And, “If you colored and can make them some money, then you all right with them. Otherwise, you just a dog in the alley. I done made this company more money from my records than all the other recording artists they got put together. And they want to balk about how much this session is costing them.”)
In these three characters, Wilson lays out his philosophy of writing plays. Let’s extract.
The process of writing a play is a state of creative flux. Wilson demonstrates this as he changes plots and monologues from rehearsal to rehearsal.
A less accomplished playwright neglects two “links.” One is between between the symbolic and the actual, the physical. The second is between the present that influences our understanding of past events and the past that serves as a backdrop and constant reminder as the present is unwound.
Actors are significant, but only within the framework of the text they’ve been provided and the direction of the play’s director. There is improvisation in music, but in acting a prior agreement has to be reached.
The playwright is the boss and arbiter. In his absence, the director calls the shots.
(What Ma says is the most complex to translate.) The audience hasn’t a clue. They have to be led, incrementally, to truth.
The financial structure of artistic production is mostly exploitative by management at the cost of creative direction. Management hasn’t a clue about the true value of what is being produced.
Although I haven’t mentioned it much here, the play is in large part Levee’s biopic. He is the character whose development we see the most of, from his childhood to his tragic act at the end of the play. As the Louis Armstrong surrogate, Levee heralds the new music, the modern blues, and modernism itself. As the only reader and writer of music in the ensemble, Levee’s final act brings to an end the life of the only literate member of the band, Toledo, the only one who has an appreciation for history and culture and, in turn, the neoclassical approach. Rest assured that Levee gets a short sentence, and returns to music making (history writing) on his own terms, eclipsing Ma and all the others of his cohort, in Act 3 of this play.
* * * * *
The first thing that grabbed my attention was the play’s introduction, written by the playwright, entitled simply, “The Play.” It immediately threw me back to the opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey,
Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
Of course, the most recent translation of that great classic appears in stanza form, so I decided to put Wilson’s opening in stanza form as well. Here is a sampling:
It is early march in Chicago, 1927.
These is a bit of a chill in the air.
Winter has broken but the wind
coming off the lake does not carry
the promise of spring. The people of the city
are bundled and brisk in their defense
against such misfortunes as the weather
and the business of the city proceeds
largely undisturbed.
Chicago in 1927 is a rough city,
a bruising city,
a city of millionaire and derelicts,
gangsters and roughhouse dandies,
whores and Irish grandmothers who move
through its streets fingering long black rosaries.
Somewhere a man is wrestling
with the taste of a woman in his cheek.
Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere
the moon has fallen through a window
and broken into thirty pieces of silver.Unlike other Wilson plays, Ma Rainey begins with two white characters in a dialogue, the record company executive, Sturdyvant, and the manager, Irvin. Very few of Wilson’s plays even have white characters, much less in a prominent place like the opening (There is one, Selig, in Gem of the Ocean, and the same character appears again in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone).
Later in Act One, after the opening dialogue that pretty much sets the scene, Wilson provides in the stage direction a carefully detailed description of each member of the band. I won’t produce it here, but that paragraph is worthy of our attention as it “plays” out over the course of the two acts.
A couple of other preliminary thoughts.
The play lays out a collection of Ma Rainey songs that she and the band rehearse and perform over the course of the play. These songs provide a good introduction to the sound of Ma Rainey and are still available. I put them all together on a playlist here.
A “surprise” includes a poem Wilson recites about his grandfather, also named Cutler, which I found a bit ironic, but maybe not so. Here is the latter:
And here is the transcription (so you can read along. (Credits to Jeannie M on Youtube):
His chest stripped open to reveal a raven, huge with sharp talons, a song stuck in his throat and beneath the feathers, beneath the shudder and rage, the pages of a book closed and the raven took flight. Bynum Cutler. Savage, mule trainer, singer, shaper of wood and iron. Bynum Cutler, who spread his seed over nine counties in North Carolina, seed carried by the wind in the sails of ships and planted among the cane break, among Georgia pine, among boles of cotton planted in the fertile fields of women who snapped open like fresh berries, like cities in full season welcoming its architects and ennobling them with gifts of blood.
A central character named Bynum appears in a later play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. So his maternal grandfather (who Wilson never knew) appears twice in his plays.
Apart from the interweaving storylines and the evolving plots and subplots that we will discuss, I’d like to include here two other mentions. One is Toledo’s pontifications about African conceptualism, a real thing that existed (and exists) in the study of modern African art, and in Wole Soyinka’s treatment of African drama (see chapter 2, “Drama and the African world-view,“ in Myth, Literature and the African World) much later than 1927 where this play was set. Still I think there may be a connection. Second is the passing, but not so passing, mention of Booker T. Washington, a figure revered by Wilson throughout his writings and interviews.
Finally, here is a link to an article about the real life Ma Rainey to put it all in historic perspective:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-queer-black-woman-who-reinvented-the-blues
* * * * *
I mentioned towards the end of the session a proposal that the star of the play is not Ma Rainey. I believe the star might be Levee, even though his end at the play’s conclusion is not a pleasant nor a pleasing one. Levee is the modernist, he represents the avant-garde, the next wave in musical composition, while Ma represents the old, entrenched way, the “old jug band music” to which Levee repeatedly refers.
But Levee has his own issues. He was emotionally traumatized as a child, forced to watch the gang-rape of his mother, then physically traumatized when he tried to stop the rape with a knife and was slashed with the knife across his chest. He was further traumatized when his father, seeking to exact revenge against the rapists (and successful in killing four of them), was caught, hung and burned in the woods. Wilson describes Levee in the scene-setter as flamboyant and buffoonish, as playing the wrong notes frequently, and as often confusing his skill with his talent.
Still, he is the star of the play, the archetype for Louis Armstrong, who as a young man played trumpet in Ma Rainey’s band. See Louis Armstrong, the First Great American Modernist here: Was Louis Armstrong the First Great American Modernist? My question is, was Wilson gently leading us to this conclusion?
We also took note of Levee’s obsession with shoes, getting into arguments twice in the play when band members “stepped” on his shoes, the final act resulting in an enraged Levee committing the knifing murder of fellow band member, Toledo. We discussed in class the possible symbolism of Levee’s fixation on his shoes, although the class did not all agree that shoes may have symbolized mobility, transportation, moving out of a bad situation and moving towards a good or better one. I personally thought the shoe symbolism concept was one with merit, and I found myself on YouTube listening to Robert Johnson’s original “Walkin’ Blues” and more recent covers of the Johnson masterpiece by Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt and Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead).
Levee has yet another thematic connection to Robert Johnson. It is said that Robert Johnson “sold” his soul to the devil in exchange for his music talent. Levee mentions in two separate conversations his willingness to “sell” his soul to Satan in conjunction with his overall rejection of Christianity and more traditional beliefs. We saw that “skepticism” expressed by Becker in Jitney, and we’ll see it again with Troy in Fences. Maybe this is another conclusion Wilson himself is leading us to – skepticism as a humanist element of modern thought.
Amazing note. I thinks blues and musical references are just cultural associations to unveil the struggles, and heal the wounds, aren't they?