From Jug Band to Dixieland: The Musical Development behind August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

From Jug Band to Dixieland: The Musical Development behind August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom SUSAN C.W. ABBOTSON Ma Rainey takes place in 1927 and introduces us to a fictionalized version of the real blues singer Ma Rainey, spending an afternoon in the recording studio with her backup band. The latter dominates the action, and we watch as Cutler , Slow Drag, Toledo, and Levee practise a few tunes, chat about their lives, and squabble over their differences while being overseen by the people who have the real control: the white producer, Sturdyvant, and the band's agent, Irvin. Ma, with her entourage, appears late in the play to make her recording, and although she is a powerful symbol, it is Levee who dominates the action of the play and provides the shocking denouement in which he kills Toledo. One question the play raises is, Whom should we support - Ma or Levee? The play's title attests to the ambivalence of Wilson's answer. Although it names Ma, it actually refers to the song rather than to the person, and it is a song that Levee is trying to claim for his own. The similarities between the characters ensure that we cannot easily dismiss the claims of either one. Gerald Weales suggests that Levee's "sense of self' is "not unlike Ma's" and that she fires him because she sees him as a personal threat. I Both characters "appreciat[e] ... the material" things that money can buy, particularly clothes and shoes. Both arrive late, "accentuat[ing] their similarity" to each other and their difference from the rest. Their late arrival, James C. McKelly points out, indicates that they "have lives beyond the world of the studio," and they both "share the requisites of genius: a fierce need for uncompromising, undiluted self-expression. and for unequivocal artistic control over perfonnance. Levee even identifies Ma as his model for producing art in a white-dominated industry ."2 Levee's attitude toward Ma mixes contempt and admiration. While he seems dismissive of her "jug-band music,"3 he clearly admires her ability to push around whites. Ma's attitude toward Levee is only contemptuous. Ma is a complicated figure. Her music has definite benefits; it acts as a balm to soothe - illustrated by the way she quite literally sings to make her Modern Drama, 43:1 (Spring 2000) 100 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom tOt feet feel better (59). However, she refuses to help Levee by singing his version of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," though she agrees to help her nephew, Sylvester, by having him speak the introduction. Ma's version helps Sylvester to find his voice momentarily, but it effectively silences Levee. Ma's decision is rooted in her narrow concept of community - as she says, she sings only for herself and will, therefore, sing only her songs and use only her arrangements (78-79,62). Sylvester is "family," and Dussie Mae is her lover, so she will embrace them within her personal realm of care, but characters beyond an immediate relationship are left to fend for themselves. Ma's blues have value beyond entertainment - they can give her and others strength and an understanding of their roots and connections. Ma tells us, "You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life. [...] This be an empty world without the blues" (82-83, intervening dialogue omitted), and she is right. However, Levee's music does not deny this, but tries to build on it. Most jazz forms, including Levee's Dixieland swing, have developed from the blues, and so contain the same intrinsic cultural encoding that we find within the blues, even though they sound different. We should not dismiss his work as empty of content just because it is dance music. Levee's tunes may be more polished than Ma's music, but they are no less authentic in their own way. Paul Carter Harrison considers Levee's name as "signifying a possible kinship with the new music soundings of jazz being created along the Mississippi Levees of New Orleans during the period" and suggests that Levee is "us[ing I the music ... to impose order on...