May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essyas on the Drama of August Wilson

Speaking of Ma Rainey / Talking about the Blues

SANDRA ADELL Speaking ofMa Rainey / Talking about the Blues I've traveled 'Til 1m tired And I ain't satisfied I've traveled 'til 1m tired And I ain't satisfied IfI don'tfind my sweet man I'll ramble 'til I die Ah Lawdy Lawd Lawd Lawdy Lawd Lawdy Lawd lawd Lawd Ah Lawdy Lawd lawd lawdy Lawd lawdy lawd lawd lawd Lawd lawdy Lawd Lawd Lawd Lawd Lawdy lawd lawd lawd - "Slow Drivin'Moan" by Gertrude (Ma) Rainey OhMaRainey Singyo'song; Now you's back Whah you belong, Git way inside us, Keep us strong. -Sterling Brown August Wilson's drama receives its strongest impulses from what Houston Baker has called the "blues matrix"-that metaphorical space where down-home folk like Boy Willie, Wining Boy, and Doaker in The Piano Lesson , Bynum in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and Madame Ma Rainey in Ma 52 S PEA KIN G 0 F MAR A I N E Y Rainey's Black Bottom all reside. Each of these characters serves as a kind of repository for a musical tradition that Wilson considers crucial to the development of the historical perspective he needs in order to write. In a 1989 interview with Bill Moyers, Wilson explained why the blues are so important for his work: The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural responses of blacks in America to the situation that they find themselves in. Contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. You get the ideas and attitudes of the people as part of the oral tradition. This is a way of passing along information. If you're going to tell someone a story, and if you want to keep information alive, you have to make it memorable so that the person hearing it will go tell someone else. This is how it stays alive. The music provides you an emotional reference for the information, and it is sanctioned by the community in the sense that if someone sings the song, other people sing the song. They keep it alive because they sanction the information that it contains.! Like the blues singer, Wilson keeps his story alive by improvising on a theme: the theme of displaced Southern black people struggling to survive in a hostile Northern urban environment. Wilson makes his story memorable by elaborating a philosophical system in which music becomes the metaphysical activity par excellence. Music is tied to understanding in a most primordial way, one that evades any logical explanation. This is the point Ma Rainey makes when she complains to Cutler about how badly white folks have misunderstood what it means to sing the blues: 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 don't sing to feel better. You sing'cause that's a way of understanding life. (82) It is also a way of securing for one's selfa temporary reprieve from the forces of oppression with which each of Wilson's characters must always contend. And it is through the figure of Ma Rainey that Wilson most strongly articulates the possibility for grounding this kind of self-possession in" the rituals and soulful rhythms of those low-down dirty gut-bucket blues. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the first ofwhat August Wilson has referred to as a "cycle of history plays," which he hopes will "stand as a record of Black S PEA KIN G 0 F MAR A I N E Y 53 experience over the past hundred years." Set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, this two-act play attempts to explore, among other things, the tensions arising out of a conflict between a traditional vaudeville-based down-home blues aesthetic and a new, more fast-paced and urbane style of the blues. It also presents a powerful and persuasive image of the woman who was called the Mother of the Blues. Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was born on April 26, 1886, in Columbus, Georgia. According to one source, she made her theater debut in 1900 in a talent show called "The Bunch of Blackberries." Four years later she married William "Pi' Rainey with whom she spent many years traveling and performing on the Southern minstrel and vaudeville show circuit. By the 1920S when she...