Good Housekeeping
On December 18, Netflix released the new movie Black Bottom by Ma Rainey, a drama adapted from a play of the same name, written by the Pulitzer winning playwright August Wilson. Made by Denzel Washington and starring Viola Davis, the film revolves around the real life blues pioneer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the day she and her band recorded a song called “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”.
Watching Viola portray Ma, it is clear that the Oscar-winning actress was very prepared to play the powerful, obscene and charismatic singer. Although Viola worried about not being able to sing well enough to play the iconic “Mother of the Blues” after reading the script, she knew she had to get involved.
“I think that [August] captures our mood as black people, “she told CBS News.” It captures our mood, our vulnerability, our tragedies, our trauma. And it humanizes us. And it allows us to talk. “
So, who is the real Ma Rainey?
Like Viola, the real Ma Rainey was an incredibly talented artist. Ma was born Gertrude Pridgett in the South under the Jim Crow laws of her mother, Ella, and her father, Thomas. Although, for The Guardian, records suggest that Ma was born in Alabama in September 1882, the singer herself used to say that she was born on April 26, 1886 in Columbus, Georgia.
When she was just a teenager, Gertrude started traveling with vaudeville acts, which New York Times jazz critic Giovanni Russonello it is described as “cabaret-like shows that developed from minstrels in the mid-1800s and catered mainly to white audiences”. According to the critic, the legend says that during a visit to Missouri in 1902, Gertrude first heard a country blues singer. Inspired by the artist, she reportedly started singing the same song as encore on her own shows.
Soon after, in 1904, Ma married her husband, William “Pa” Rainey. The New York Times reports that the duo eventually became known as “Ma and Pa Rainey, the Blues Assassins”. They traveled from city to city with the popular Rabbit Foot Minstrels (at that time, famous blues singer Bessie Smith made her start singing as one of Ma’s artists).
After separating from William in 1916, Ma started his own performance company, called Madam Gertrude Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Smart Set, and she continued to grow in popularity. In 1923, Ma became one of the first black artists to sign with Paramount, and she made her first of about 100 recordings. During that time, she brought massive blues hits like “Moonshine Blues”, “See See Rider” and “Trust No Man” to the mainstream.
For much of the 1920s, Ma lived in Chicago and performed at parties and shows around the city while recording tracks for Paramount. In 1927 – also known as the year Black Bottom by Ma Rainey takes place in – Ma was in her forties and had already made recordings with several musicians under the name of Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Jazz Band, including music giants like Willie “The Lion” Smith and Louis Armstrong. According to A&E, she recorded her last session in 1928, producing songs like “Black Eye Blues”, “Sleep Talking Blues” and “Runaway Blues”. After this, The Guardian reports that Paramount ended up canceling his recording contract “because his blues style was no longer considered fashionable”.
Ma was still performing in the early 1930s, but after officially ending show business in 1935, she returned to Columbus, Georgia, to manage two entertainment venues and participate in church activities. Unfortunately, just a few years after his retirement began, Ma died of a heart attack on December 22, 1939.
According to a New York Times an obituary published in 2019 for his series “Overlooked” highlighting luminaries whose deaths were not reported in the newspaper, Ma was the first artist to “overcome the divide” between vaudeville and the “authentic southern black folk expression”. Ma is also credited with opening new paths through the narratives told in her songs, as several of the songs have strong feminist elements in the lyrics, such as Angela Davis noted in Legacies of blues and black feminism.
Her legacy as an LGBTQ pioneer also continues to be celebrated. Per Rolling Stone, Ma is hailed as a queer icon for being so open about her attraction to men and women in her songs, although she has never publicly identified herself as bisexual. In his play, August made a point of celebrating Ma’s sexuality (including his rumors of relationships with his dancers and with Bessie Smith) with the inclusion of the fictional character Dussie Mae, portrayed by Taylour Paige in the Netflix movie.
Although his music temporarily fell out of print when the Great Depression hit and Paramount closed, his catalog was revived in the 1960s, when the songs were chosen by record labels Milestone and Biograph, according to the New York Times. During the Black Arts Movement of the 60s, poet Al Young wrote the famous “Dance for Ma Rainey”, to honor his artistic talent.
In the 1980s, Ma was at the forefront and center of pop culture once again, thanks to Broadway’s staging of Black Bottom by Ma Rainey, starring Theresa Merritt as an acclaimed singer (in the 2003 renaissance, Whoopi Goldberg pictured Ma). At about the same time, Sandra R. Lieb published a book about Ma’s life entitled Mother of the Blues: A Study by Ma Rainey.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Ma’s contributions to music continued to be recognized. She was included in the Blues Hall of Fame in 1983 and in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and honored with a commemorative stamp from the US Postal Service in 1994. In 2004, her hit “See See Rider” was included in the Grammy Hall of Fame and added to the Library of Congress National Recordings Registry.
More recently, in 2017, the Rainey McCullers School of Arts in Columbus, Georgia, was named after Ma and the novelist Carson McCullers.
It’s from Netflix Black Bottom by Ma Rainey based on a true story?
All the events that unfold in the Netflix film – which shows a day in the life of Ma Rainey and his band – did not happen exactly as described. Although Ma lived in Chicago in 1927, had relationships with women and traveled with a band, all the characters in the play – Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), Butler (Colman Domingo), Slow drag (Michael Potts), Toledo (Glynn Turman), Sylvester (Dusan Brown), Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), and Levee (Chadwick Boseman) – are fictitious.
That said, there are some real historical elements highlighted in the piece. For example, the song Ma is seen recording with her band, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”, was a real number written in response to the 1920s dance craze known as the black bottom, which originated in the Southern Black community (and supposedly was named after a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit). When the black background exploded in popularity during the 1920s, several artists, including Ma, recorded dance tracks for him.
The stories highlighted in Black Bottom by Ma Rainey they are also based on the real experiences of black Americans in the early 20th century. The exploitation of black artists was widely prominent at the time of Ma’s popularity. Robert Springerfrom “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation: Copyright in the Blues” and History.com, it was common practice for white-owned record labels to have black artists give up their recording rights (and then white artists released covers of their songs), pay black artists badly and make it difficult for black artists to receive the royalties they have earned.
Black Bottom by Ma Rainey is actually one of several works included in the American Century Cycle collection. To portray the black experience throughout the 20th century, August wrote a piece for each decade – Black Bottom by Ma Rainey was set in the 1920s, The piano lesson it was in the 1930s, and Fences (Denzel and Viola starred in the film version of the play in 2016) it was in the 1950s.
In an article for The New York Times before his death in 2005, the legendary playwright wrote:
“I wanted to put this culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and effort and through deep moments in our history when society in general thought less of us than we. think of ourselves. “
To honor August, Denzel made it clear that he intends to bring all 10 American Century Cycle will be displayed on the big screen in the coming years.
“We are going to do one a year for the next nine years. I am very excited about it,” he said The Hollywood Reporter. “That they put the property in my hands, and trust me. This is good enough for me. There is nothing better than that.”
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