Despite August Wilson's continual and insistent emphasis on the fundamental importance of the blues to his theatrical canon, surprisingly few of the many scholars who have written about his plays seem to have followed the author's example and listened closely to early twentieth-century African American music. The key to Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (first performed in 1984), in particular, lies not in dramaturgy, criticism, or literary theory but, instead, in the neglected particularities of its historical musical backgrounds. Key recordings by such 1920s Black artists as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Perry Bradford, Sadie Jackson, and Charley Patton, as well, of course, as the eponymous "Mother of the Blues" herself-not to mention the contested history of the Black Bottom dance-are essential to any informed interpretation of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Such intertexts complicate the prevailing critical tendency to read the play as a clear-cut conflict between traditional Southern folk culture and urban commercial music, for Ma Rainey also consistently concerns the dynamic interaction and synthesis between downhome blues and modern jazz. The core tension in Wilson's play, in fact, is between the historical miracle that African Americans developed and preserved their invaluable music for posterity within the interstices of white corporate control and the individual artistic conflicts created by systemic racism, which consistently threatened to forestall such harmonious and vital Black cultural achievement.
