Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
July 30, 2009
Minstrelsy’s Role in the History of the Blues
Almost all of the blues queens and many other blues musicians got their start touring on the minstrel circuit in the Southern United States. These black minstrel shows were direct outgrowths of the blackface performances by white performers that became popular in the South in the 1830’s, consisting of racist skits about plantation life, with exaggerated stereotypes and imitations of black song and dance. I find the negotiations and appropriations of black life from the advent of minstrelsy through early blues history fascinating, as different elements of its performance and production pass back and forth between black and white hands.
Besides entertaining white audiences, early blackface minstrel shows also served to enforce racial stereotypes and unite poor and rich whites against a common black enemy. However, by the 1850’s, blacks themselves were imitating the very form that had portrayed their race as infantile and grotesque, capitalizing on the “authentic” nature of their race to attract both black and white audiences. The entrance of black performers into the entertainment industry allowed for the blues to develop out of the cotton fields and into a more structured form of professional entertainment. Blacks took the form given to them, the minstrel show, and embellished it to make it their own by adding blues to the comedy and vaudeville routines typical of blackface. However, the blues then became a self-standing form that was increasingly co-opted and commodified by white producers. The blues itself is a mix between European-derived ballads and African-American work songs on the cotton fields, and this mixture of black and white influence pertains not only to the form of the songs, but to the process of production and performance itself.
On a side note, I’m also intrigued by the extent to which talking about blackface and minstrelsy has become something completely taboo in the US. From my experience, it is not regarded as such an abomination in other parts of the world, but simply recognized as a part of history. There is perhaps no better representation of blatant and mocking racism than blackface minstrelsy, but at the same time minstrelsy was the venue which first gave blacks the chance to earn money as entertainers. How might we try to rethink taboos and inscribe blackface into this larger narrative of African-American performance?
July 28, 2009
Jacob Lawrence
For Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, I’ve been doing some research on the Great Migration, the exodus of black Americans from the rural South into the industrialized cities of the North. I’ve decided it’s not all that useful for the actors, but it does, in fact, pertain to other August Wilson plays like Piano Lesson and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Between 1916 and 1919, half a million black people migrated to the North to take advantage of industrial jobs created by the war boom. For some, it was also a chance to escape the racial violence and discrimination of the South.
In the 1940’s, artist Jacob Lawrence (a Harlem Renaissance guy) was commissioned by the government to illustrate the story of the first wave of black migrants. He painted dozens of panels—mostly tempera paint on wooden hardboard—accompanied by captions. You can view all of them—in order—right here. Here’s a sampling:
The Migration of the Negro, panel 1, 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (30.5 x 45.7 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Artwork © Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, courtesy of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY / Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy [28.1942.14]. © 2004 Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). “The labor agent sent south by northern industry was a familiar presence in the Black communities,” panel 28 from The Migration Series, 1940-41 (text and title revised by the artist, 1993). Tempera on gesso on composition board
The Migration of the Negro, panel 14, 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 18 x 12 in. (45.7 x 30.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Mrs. David M. Levy
The Migration of the Negro, panel 3, 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (30.5 x 45.7 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
July 27, 2009
“A Dance for Ma Rainey” by Al Young
I’m going to be just like you, Ma
Rainey this monday morning
clouds puffing up out of my head
like those balloons
that float above the faces of white people
in the funny papers
I’m going to hover in the corners
of the world, Ma
& sing from the bottom of hell
up to the tops of high heaven
& send out scratchless waves of yellow
& brown & that basic black honey
misery
I’m going to cry so sweet
& so low
& so dangerous,
Ma,
that the message is going to reach you
back in 1922
where you shimmer
snaggle-toothed
perfumed &
powdered
in your bauble beads
hair pressed & tied back
throbbing with that sick pain
I know
& hide so well
that pain that blues
jives the world with
aching to be heard
that downness
that bottomlessness
first felt by some stolen delta nigger
swamped under with redblooded american agony;
reduced to the sheer shit
of existence
that bred
& battered us all,
Ma,
the beautiful people
our beautiful brave black people
who no longer need to jazz
or sing to themselves in murderous vibrations
or play the veins of their strong tender arms
with needles
to prove that we’re still here
July 23, 2009
Gender and the Blues Queens
Hi! I’m Anastasia, the dramaturgy intern for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” I’ve been delving into research on Ma Rainey and the recording industry in the 20’s, but also looking at some blues history and criticism. Poring through “Write me a Few of Your Lines,” a book on the blues, I came across an essay by Angela Davis arguing for the radical liberal nature of the 1920’s blues queens (and chiefly Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith). Though the content of these singer’s lyrics, smacking with overt sexuality and domestic abuse, can be read as antifeminist and even misogynist, she argues that they portray a radical new kind of femininity that was not afraid to break with traditional structures that had little relevance to post-emancipation black society.
“Well I’d rather my man would hit me than jump right up and quit me
Tain’t nobody’s bizness if I do, do, do, do
I swear I won’t call no copper if I’m beat up by my papa
Tain’t nobody’s bizness if I do, if I do”
- Bessie Smith, “Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness if I Do”
While these lyrics seem at first glance to condone domestic violence, Davis argues that they in fact contain an underhanded irony about the woman’s treatment, similar to the indirect methods of expression used by blacks under slavery. And as Donna Haraway says, “Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.” This perturbation these lyrics create is a very humorous, serious break with what is already existent.
More straightforward expressions of defiance and liberation from patriarchy are also widespread in blues lyrics. I was certainly surprised to read the lyrics of Ma Rainey’s “Prove it on Me Blues,” which is explicitly about lesbianism as a preferred alternative to relationships with men:
“They said I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men
It’s true I wear a collar and a tie
Make the wind blow all the while
‘Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
They sure got to prove it on me….”
Emancipation forced black men to find work, often necessitating their traveling and leaving their wives or lovers at home. Even if they could find work near home, they were often simply lured away by the possibilities of travel now that they had finally won their freedom. The historical circumstances left women abandoned by their husbands and lovers, transforming domestic roles and gender relations. So while white ideology of the time period pronounced women’s subordination and closed lips on discussions of sexuality, black women were often in situations that had little to do with established gender roles or romanticized notions of relationships. Rather than submitting, their lyrics point to women fighting back, and passionately:
“If I see him I’m gon’ beat him, gon’ kick and bite him, too
Gonna take my weddin’ butcher, gonna cut him two in two.”
It’s incredible to see how these women were creating a space of autonomy for themselves and re-evaluating gender long before these barriers were broken down in mainstream or academic culture. And with such fire!
I ain’t no high yella, I’m a deep killer brown
I ain’t gonna marry, ain’t gon’ settle down
I’m gon’ drink good moonshine and run these browns down
See that long lonesome road, Lord, you know it’s gonna end
And I’m a good woman and I can get plenty men.
July 23, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Maybe I’m imposing the “current events” angle on this too much, but I began comparing the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. with Ma’s near-arrest by the Chicago police officer in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt from the play. Ma is being cited for assaulting a taxi driver:
MA RAINEY: Tell the men who he’s messing with!
POLICEMAN: Do you know this lady?
MA RAINEY: Just tell the man who I am! That’s all you gotta do.
POLICEMAN: Lady, will you let me talk, huh?
MA RAINEY: Tell the man who I am!
IRVIN: Wait a minute… wait a minute! Let me handle it. Ma, will you let me handle it?
MA RAINEY: Tell him who he’s messing with!
IRVIN: Okay! Okay! Give me a chance! Officer, this is one of our recording artists… Ma Rainey.
MA RAINEY: Madame Rainey! Get it straight! Madame Rainey! Talking about taking me to jail!
The “real” Ma Rainey was arrested several times herself, once for practicing illicit sexual relations with other women in a Chicago hotel room (she was bailed out by Bessie Smith, according to the story). In this fictional incident, she’s pretty clearly being profiled herself, in a time before that word really even existed. What made me think of Gates is the simple fact that they are both celebrities in their own right, and how being a celebrity or being well-off is—to a point—no protection from being singled out by law enforcement. The latest development of the story is that President Obama has now remarked upon it in a national press conference and condemned it, calling the police officer in question “stupid.” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting take on Obama’s perspective:
I was not so much surprised by Obama’s answer, as I was by his thinly-veiled anger. Anger may not be the right word, perhaps “perturbed.” After thinking about, I should not have been. Obama’s been pissed off before in public interactions.
Moreover, for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class black people even more than it angers anyone else, because they tend to be individuals who, by society’s lights, are very accomplished. They deeply resent being lumped in with the mass. And more than anyone they resent the whole “when you’re black, you talk to the police like this” routine. Obama has lived as a member of that class for a large portion of his adult life, or he’s had some concentrated exposure to it—the black strivers roll deep on the South Side. It’s not shocking that he was pissed.
Coates doesn’t fault Obama for his privileged position, but I think he questions why this issue could only come to such prominence when it happened to a famous Harvard professor. In Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey is not of the upper middle-class, and despite her celebrity, she’s no celebrity to most white people in the 1920’s. Even if she thinks she deserves better treatment, I don’t think that, realistically, she expects that the cop is going to give it to her because of who she is. I suspect that she fights back only because she knows that Irvin and Sturdyvant, her white producers, can back her up (and ultimately, it’s Irvin’s bribe to the cop that gets her off the hook). Furthermore, Irvin and Sturdyvant protect Ma only insofar as it’s a means to continue making money off of her. Ma understands that she’s only temporarily renting fair treatment from the powerful.
I don’t want to diminish Professor Gates’s treatment, which was unfair and humiliating. However, that incident was followed by an outcry in the national media, an apology by the president of Harvard, and then a condemnation by the President of the United States. That kind of validation is hard to come by for most black Americans who find themselves the victims of racial profiling, especially when the discrimination is more subtle and hard to prove and isn’t followed by a front page New York Times story on their behalf. I think Obama said all the right things in his press conference answer by drawing out the necessary lessons of the incident, particularly in calling the history of law enforcement’s racial profiling a “fact” and pointing out “how race remains a factor in this society.” As a white man of fairly affluent upbringing, it’s easy for me to perceive sometimes that race isn’t a factor anymore, and maybe it takes the arrest of a university professor, a case literally close to home, to remind me otherwise.
