Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Themes

This play presents a representative incident that illustrates and interprets a crucial episode in the history of the African American people: the migration from the southern farms of their origin to the northern industrial cities; their emergence into modern life, with resulting transformation and spiritual crisis. It is a story of old ways and new ways, with themes of racism and human suffering. The action of the play takes place on the threshold between old and new, and it is appropriately charged with tension and conflict. The conflicts are not resolved during the play, and the play does not end hopefully. The conflicts include those between old and new, white and black people, northern urban innovation and southern tradition, young persons and old, ownership and labor, book learning (print) and folk wisdom (oral), backwoods stomp dance parties and electronic mass media, and community cohesion and individualism. At stake are survival, wisdom, and the opportunity for a good life.

Even the setting of the play reflects dualism and threshold in its division of playing space into a ground-level room for the recording session and a basement room for rehearsal. The audience sees only one room at any time. No white character enters the band room.

The contrasts and conflicts show up in the interactions between characters, notably between Ma Rainey and Sturdyvant and between Toledo and Levee. Sturdyvant, representing the interests of sales and new capital, feels no respect for Ma Rainey, her music, or her musicians. He values them only if he can use them for profit. His control over them is limited only by the extent to which he must placate Ma until she has signed release papers. Ma resists by refusing to cooperate unless he accedes to her wishes and recognizes her stardom.

Blues music is the fulcrum upon which the polarized forces balance. It provides the play with a title, a focus for the dramatic situation, and a vehicle for the themes. It is the glue that binds the characters together and the knife that slices them apart. The audience not only hears talk about this music but also hears the music itself, in fragments or in full song, in conflicting thematic styles, sung and played in spontaneous expression of individual and communal agony and wisdom or performed for impersonal mass distribution, traditional songs or songs in the very process of being composed.

In life and in the play, the evolution of this music participates in, parallels, and expresses the pattern of African American history. Ma Rainey is known as “Mother of the Blues” because she gave it...

Power
The dramatic question in the play is whether the band will complete the recording session despite conflicts...