This week I felt compelled to talk about the use of music genre to express a societal divide in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” by August Wilson. I thought that Wilson’s use of Blues and Jazz to differentiate and express the north from the south was a brilliant literary device. One of the reasons I appreciated it so much was because I don’t think I’d ever differentiated the blues from jazz. If anything— I thought that the blues was a subsection of jazz. It’s interesting to me to think of their separate origins, and even more interesting to think of how the characters of Wilson’s play embody these musical origins, and how they too— once categorically the same based on a shared identity— are now equal parts of a divide. I think Wilson does a good job of making this subtle at first, and then demonstrating how overwhelming this divide could actually be. In a way, I found that the first act of the play began as a jazz song, and ended as a blues song. At first, the play is a method of escaping to a glamorous past where music is equivalent to freedom, but it ends confronting the very real robbery of liberties that black individuals still experienced after the historicized abolition of slavery. This makes me think, too, of how the northern states still deal with racism. I believe we live in a blanket of denial, supported by our historical alliance. In a way, this necessitates jazz— a route of escapism that gently confronts the truth of societally stratification. While, in the south, there is an avenue for unabashed white supremacy and racism through alliance with the historical confederacy. This necessitates the blues— a direct confrontation with unfiltered prejudice and oppression.
