SINGING THE BLUES AND CHASING GHOSTS IN THE PIANO LESSON
In his Introduction to the 2007 editions of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle plays, theater critic John Lahr wrote, “The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson’s plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved, over the decades, from property to personhood.” Lahr knew that blues music and playwriting were inextricably intertwined for Wilson, and music figures prominently in Wilson’s plays because music has always been an essential part of Black American experience. Wilson once wrote, “I chose the blues as my aesthetic. I create worlds out of the ideas and the attitudes and the material in the blues. I think the blues are the best literature that blacks have. It is an expression of our people and our response to the world. I don’t write about the blues; I’m not influenced by the blues. I am the blues.”
And yet the music industry has also been one of the many spheres where Black Americans have been taken advantage of. During the 1930’s and 1940’s, many Black artists recorded their songs only to see exploitative white producers pocket the proceeds while the artists themselves faded into impoverished obscurity, and Wilson’s plays reflect this injustice. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Ma Rainey has become such a reliable and lucrative hitmaker that she is accorded some degree of respect by white producers. But Ma’s ego leads to frequent conflicts with the members of her band, who wield no such influence and are often in conflict with each other. Nor does Ma’s success protect her from tragedy, and the play ends with catastrophic violence. Similarly, in Seven Guitars musician Floyd Barton believes that he is headed for fame, having made a successful recording, but his hopes also end tragically.
In The Piano Lesson, Wining Boy has had comparable experiences. Doaker tells Boy Willie that Wining Boy “made one or two records a long time ago. That’s the only ones I ever known him to make. If you let him tell it he be a big recording star.” Wining Boy’s drinking and his inability to accept his circumstances seem rooted in disappointment that his dreams have come to nothing. Yet The Piano Lesson does not end tragically, even though the action seems headed that way as the struggles over the family piano threaten to engulf and destroy all the characters in the play.
Tragedy is ultimately averted, however, thanks to Berniece, and it falls to her to exorcize the ghosts of the past that haunt her family. She achieves this by imploring some of those same ghosts to help her, and only when she has done so can the troubled members of her family find peace. This is the “lesson” in the play’s deceptively simple title, a lesson that Boy Willie, especially, must learn: as long as we resist the ghosts of the past, they will continue to haunt us.
The Blues are songs of grief and pain, but the very act of singing them, of acknowledging that grief and pain, helps both the singer and the listener to rise above it. August Wilson understood this, and in The Piano Lesson, he seems to suggest that wherever Black Americans chose to live during the early twentieth century – whether they were among the six million Black Southerners who, like Doaker and Berniece and Avery, relocated during the Great Migration, or whether they remained in the South, like Boy Willie – they all would need to accept the horrific legacy of the past before they could hope to move forward into the future. To do otherwise meant staying mired in the very past that they were attempting to escape and becoming, metaphorically speaking, like the silenced Black musicians who fell into obscurity, their names and sometimes even their songs erased and forgotten. The Blues must be sung and heard, just as the ancestors must be remembered and acknowledged, with gratitude. And Berniece does so in the final words of the play: “Thank you.”
INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT
The Piano Lesson Blues artist Bukka White, who did time at Parchman Farm, recorded a song called “Parchman Farm Blues” in the 1940’s. It begins “Judge give me life this morning’ / Down on Parchman Farm”