THERE is an angry film in town. It is not about war and killing; it is a chronicle of a day in a recording studio. It is also about the blues. It is about black bottom. It is about blues legend Ma Rainey.
As cinema, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, now streaming on Netflix, has many things going for it. It has also many things going against it.
For its strength, we have a film that does avoid to “Hollywoodize” the life of a singer who popularized a musical genre called “the blues.”
What is the “blues”? Fast forward to contemporary times, to a singer named Koko Taylor who, it seemed, single-handedly sang the blues, or screamed the blues from the 1970s till her death in 2009. Koko Taylor, in an interview available on YouTube, talks about a working woman reporting to office and being told she was being laid off. “That’s the blues,” Koko Taylor intoned. “You go back to your room and find another woman’s nightgown, that’s the blues.”
There was the origin of this music—the moaning, the lament, the shrieking even, the indescribable gloom that refused to be quieted down, the lonesomeness translated into an anger confronting lies and broken vows, or loves breached for the sake of other loves.
There was music that was not music, musical lines that were not at all musical. There were melodies that were not melodic, and words almost guttural because they came from the gut, and meanings that were double and duplicitous, obscene and yet observant of the lack of manners with which women and men of color were treated.
And there was Ma Rainey singing the blues.
Ma Rainey is in this film called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and it is about time we listen to these lines: “Now, you heard the rest/Ah, boys, I’m gonna show you the best/Ma Rainey’s gonna show you her black bottom….”
It is a personal vindication, the ultimate confession of a big black Mama.
The song goes on: “I want to see that dance you call the black bottom/I wanna learn that dance/Don’t you see the dance you call your big black bottom/That’ll put you in a trance.”
Trance? Yes, the blues is a meditation, a religion. It is a protestation, a protest; it pays tribute to skin and its politics. The song goes on and on, it calls on all the boys in the neighborhood who say Ma Rainey’s black bottom is really good.
What’s going on? “Ah, do it ma, do it, honey/Look it now Ma, you gettin’ kinda rough here/You gotta be yourself now, careful now/Not too strong, not too strong, Ma….”
When Ma Rainey recorded Black Bottom, she was already a big star, a diva if you please. But even a request for bottles of Coke (Coca Cola, not the forbidden variety coke) was to be ignored. “They are interested in my voice, that’s all,” Ma Rainey would be often quoted.
That is not the only rant in the film. The boys in the band accompanying Ma Rainey placed in a decrepit basement pepper their rehearsal breaks with the recriminations about slavery and discrimination and the white man spooking the black man. They are one of the best soloists, perhaps some of the greatest players ever allowed by Ma Rainey to accompany her, but in the hands of the white men—manager and studio owner—they are putties. They exchange bitter epithets, they threaten each other bodily harm, but as soon as the white man comes down from the office, they grab immediately their instruments to show they are working.
There are, in effect, three worlds in the film. There is the studio where, overseen by the two white men, Ma Rainey swelters in the heat with her gal and nephew. Then there is the rehearsal box where the musicians are. There is one more unseen world – the world outside where black men and women have no rights and where the White Man rules.
Can there be too much anger in a film? Can there be too much injustice in the world?
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom swallows us into the pit of those years when American music was being developed by the dominated “race.” Who would ever think that what would be deemed vulgar and trashy would later compose what is presently dubbed American music?
In the meantime, we wallow in the most sordid portrayal of a great singer. Unrecognizable and physically repulsive, Ma Rainey is portrayed by Viola Davis. Gone are the fine features of this lovely actor. We are watching, sweat and grime, the make-up thawed by the heat and all but washed out, the dress in disarray, Ma Rainey, the Motha of the Blues.
Ma Rainey was there long before Billie Holiday and even way ahead of Bessie Smith. Billie Holiday,
in her biography, would cite Bessie Smith’s big sound as her inspiration. Ma Rainey would be the Mother and Smith, who would eclipse her in popularity, would be the “Empress of the Blues.” But Ma Rainey was the wellspring. Ma Rainey taught Bessie Smith how to wail.
A significant portion of the film is in the waiting, the waiting for the Mother to sing the blues. Then it comes: Viola Davis as Ma Rainey gyrates, and bumps those hips, the tiredness in her body vanishes, her soul floats above the Earth it curses and blesses and forgives with a voice that has the sonority of a baritone and the spirituality of a contralto. In between are the growls from a world of sufferings. This is music at its most real. This is a song at its most beautiful ugliness.
Structured to balance the heaviness in the studio, mainly provided by the genius of Davis, is the ensemble performance of the actors playing the session musicians.
The acting of the group is made even riveting by one actor, the much-lamented dearly departed Chadwick Boseman. He plays the trumpet player, Levee, whose resentment is only equaled by his skill to produce the most impassioned passages. Boseman cries and froths at the mouth. He is a man ready to
die or be killed for his passion and truths. He loses to dire circumstance in the film; we lose him to cancer in real life.
The screenplay is written by Ruben Santiago-Hudson based on the play of the same name by August Wilson. Music is by Branford Marsalis. The film is directed by George C. Wolf.