Ma Rainey's Black Bottom | Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Singing Wilson’s Blues
In the following essay, Harry J. Elam studies how Wilson uses blues music to treat themes related to the African-American experience in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Somewhere along the way it dawned on me that I was writing one play for each decade. Once I became conscious of that, I realized I was trying to focus on what I felt were the important issues confronting Black Americans for that decade, so ultimately they could stand as a record of Black experience over the past hundred years presented in the form of dramatic literature. What you end up with is a kind of review, or re-examination of history.… The importance of history to me is simply to find out who you are and where you’ve been. It becomes doubly important if...
[The entire page is 7203 words long]
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