On a hot summer day in 1927, the “Mother of the Blues” strode into a Chicago studio and recorded one of her greatest hits. In playwright August Wilson’s telling, the session that produced a 78 RPM called “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was contentious, and when it was over, one musician lay dead in a back room.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom isn’t meant as the literal history behind a particular recording by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the voice of many Black hits in the 1920s and one of the top moneymakers among African American entertainers at the time. Instead, Black Bottom is a larger fable about the African American experience as expressed in the music and lives of the “classic blues” of the 1920s. To be sure, the blues was entertainment for its primarily Black audience but also represented survival, even victory over the particular adversity of being Black in America.
Adapted for the screen by multiple Tony-winning theater director George C. Wolfe from a screenplay by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the film hews closely to staged theater. A few short scenes open onto the photoshopped Chicago streets surrounding the recording studio, but at heart, the film could have been mounted before an audience on a stage simply furnished with a few chairs, a piano and a microphone stand.
It’s an ensemble performance dominated by two stars, Oscar winner Viola Davis as Rainey and Chadwick Boseman, in his final film performance, as the fictional trumpeter Levee Green. They argue over music. Green represents the turn from slow-drag blues to hot jazz and she’s having none of it. She won’t even let her fictional harried white manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) or the studio’s unsympathetic owner, Mel (Jonny Coyne), tell her how or what to sing, much less some upstart from down South. Although the film doesn’t follow Rainey’s future beyond that day in 1927, it turns out her Levee and Irvin were right. Within a few years Rainey was out of fashion and retired.
But if music provides the context for Black Bottom, musicology is less at issue than the personal and social impact of America’s pervasive racism. The story’s Black musicians approach the problem in their own ways. Trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo) and bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts) are happy to earn a bare-boned living and aren’t about to upset anyone’s expectations. The philosopher in the band, pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman), worries about “the colored man’s problem” and dreams vaguely of what “all of us are going to do together” about it.
Levee says he isn’t “spooked” by the white man and will smile and say “sir” until his time comes. Rainey’s time had already arrived, but her power derives as much from the money she generates as a hitmaking singer (most of the film’s vocals are handled by Maxayn Lewis) as her force of nature personality, immoveable and implacable as a mountain. She’s unafraid to say no—to her band, her manager and producer, and the police. The limitations of her approach are apparent. She would have been arrested outside the studio if Irvin hadn’t slipped the cop a few dollars. A Black woman in an expensive car draws suspicious eyes, not unlike the hard stares that confront her band members when they cross the street to buy Cokes at a deli.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerfully acted performance of Black trauma, the rage and violence and lashing out—sometimes at the wrong targets—rising from a lifetime of bigotry and abuse. And yes, racism influenced the way music was once heard in America. Mel buys a song from Levee for a couple of bucks and—in the final scene—produces a bleached-out Caucasian cover under a Paul Whiteman-esque band leader. The energy of Black creativity is duly recognized—and exploited.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is playing at the Downer Theater and is streaming on Netflix.