Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

By August Wilson,

Book cover of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play

Book description

NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING VIOLA DAVIS AND CHADWICK BOSEMAN

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson comes the extraordinary Ma Rainey's Black Bottom—winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.

The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Ma Rainey's Black Bottom as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I remember reading Wilson’s play for the first time as a grad student, not long after I’d been a street musician in Harlem working with a brilliant, irascible old bluesman from Mississippi, and thinking “I know these guys.”

Wilson, the greatest American blues playwright (and one of the greatest American dramatists period), has an uncanny ear for the jibing, jiving, wisdom-declaiming back-and-forth that fills the conversational space between four southern-born musicians who find themselves in a Chicago recording studio one day in 1927, getting ready to back up their boss, Ma Rainey.

Toledo, elder and griot, the keeper of ancestral…

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