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August Wilson’s Blue Imaginary

by Malik Washington

It was a record. Black grooves engraved in circuitous pattern. A toll of one nickel to return home, the mast of the needle navigating the writer through time and space. Knowledge moving on the rhythm of a revolving platter.

Repeat.

Again. And again. And again.

By his own recollection, there were twenty-one agains. That was the number of times (22) that August Wilson listened to Bessie Smith’s “Nobody In Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine,” back-to-back, after bringing it home in a brown paper bag full of vinyl albums from a local Pittsburgh shop.

Wilson’s moment of insatiable intimacy with the music could be familiar to anyone who has ever been delivered new worlds through aural channels or bodily passage. But for Wilson, it was a moment of expanded possibilities within the world he already knew quite well. It was a history cast in personal mythology. Standing out among the official scrolls — equal parts salacious, wayward, and assured of its place. And it moved him closer to believing that his own beginnings demanded the type of recording that one day might be listened to back-to-back on an album, or read voraciously between the pages, or viewed for generations on a theatrical stage.

From this point forward, the blues became the mode and the map by which August Wilson embarked on one of the greatest accomplishments — not just in American theatre, but in the canon of Black literature — his ten-play Century Cycle. Each play documents a different decade of Black life in America, all but one set in his hometown, Pittsburgh’s Hill District. ¹

All of Wilson’s cycle plays wear the shine of a well-traveled bluesman. In the glare of black-leathered shoes and brows beading with sweat, audiences soon realize that the stage light is focused on them, head-to-toe, honest reflections of Black life and living on its own terms. In a number of these plays, music is the direct subject for these reflections: the fate of an ancestral heirloom piano in The Piano Lesson, the fictionalized recording session of a blues legend and her band in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the entanglements of a budding guitarist and his six castmates in Seven Guitars. Where there are not explicit portrayals of musicians and their instruments, like in the Muddy Waters’ inspired title Two Trains Running, the blues is heard in the movement of themes, the riffs and refrains of dialogue, the recitation of popular lyrics, and characters whose gestures play together like the early morning hours at Ernie Barnes’ Sugar Shack, or more appropriately, like the disparate patterns and textures made whole in a Romare Bearden collage. ²

An early example of Wilson’s relationship to the blues comes before his iconic cycle in 1976’s The Homecoming. The first of his plays to be staged by a resident theatre company, The Homecoming was directed by Vernell Lillie at Kuntu Repertory Theatre (the university housed successor to Black Horizons Theatre, a community theatre that Wilson co-founded on the Hill alongside playwright and mentor Rob Penny, among others.) ³

The Homecoming is dedicated to Blind Lemon Jefferson and “the countless ‘unknown’ blues singers, whose stories remain largely untold.” The innovative singer/guitarist became one of the earliest and most popular solo blues acts recorded in the 1920s after leaving his home in Texas for a contract with Paramount Records in Chicago. With musicians like Jefferson and Ma Rainey, the record label was a pioneer in the lucrative market of so-called race records, built on exploitative contracts and marketing schemes — a legacy that lives today. Jefferson was displeased with his contract and when he died outside during a harsh winter storm at age 36, the tragic, peculiar circumstances of his death provoked speculation that only added to the blues worthy lore of his life.

The one-act play opens with two men sitting outside an abandoned Alabama train station in 1927, where they await the arrival of a Jefferson-like figure’s casket. They are approached by two white record company agents from Chicago who have scoured the South, thirsty to tap the well of Black blues traditions and stake their claim. Suspecting that they’ve found their match, the agents prod the men to sing and play the guitar. The men respond indifferently with childlike rhymes and melodies, frustrating the agents, who demand to hear the “real blues.”

The agents raise the stakes with offers of whiskey and cash, but their singular objective to exploit the men is turned inside out when the ignorance and desperation they wish to prey upon is swiftly shown to belong to them. The evidence is in the silly lyrics that the men sing — interpolations of rhymes to a children’s game, “Aunt Jenny Died,” about a line of eager suitors who are turned away in their pursuit of a young woman.

In variations of the game — once played in English-speaking corners of the African diaspora, from Jamaica to Pittsburgh — one set of children (the suitors) encircle two children in the middle of the circle (the young woman Jenny and her mother). Each suitor takes their turn inquiring about Jenny, to which the mother repeatedly responds that she is dead. Unsatisfied, the suitors question how she died and mime various causes of death until they’ve reached the end of their verses. The circle breaks, and Jenny (or the ghost of Jenny) darts out to tag any one of the suitors who will then assume the middle of the circle and become Jenny in the next round of play. ⁴

In The Homecoming’s version of the game, after the agents have tried every trick and promise to get the “real blues” to come out, the play ends when the son of Jefferson (or, his living ghost) emerges with a shotgun, directing the agents into the station, locking and abandoning them inside.

Wilson would later reflect on his earliest plays as lacking his own voice, poor imitations of Amiri Baraka and the revolutionary Black nationalist theatre of the 60s that inspired the creation of Black Horizons. Wilson was responsible for directing many of these productions, whose by any means mode of social, political, and cultural upheaval was at the center of its dramaturgy. Lillie, herself a product and keeper of this Black Arts tradition, expressed misgivings about The Homecoming, including doubts about Wilson’s political commitments and abilities as a playwright. ⁵

Yet behind The Homecoming’s weaknesses and a self-styling that he soon determined was not his own, Wilson’s unique voice can be heard budding from the Black Arts movement’s cultural and aesthetic aims, one that manifests as an abiding reverence for the blues as “the best literature that we as black Americans have”—a way of knowing and navigating the world. ⁶ ⁷

In this treatment, “Aunt Jenny Died” and the real blues are indistinguishable in form and practice. Traditions of play and ritual involving repetition, call-and-response, improvisation, and wit to continue participation. Having learned from the previous generation, the men guard “their song” by embracing its wisdom.⁸ They replay and repurpose the ritual; openly plotting their resistance through the animation of words, melody, and lore passed down to them.

Like the saxophonist Probe returning from exile with the fabled Afro-Horn in Henry Dumas’ short story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the sacred power of Black music is set in contrast to the rapacious consumption of it. ⁹ Each story ends with a sudden climactic inversion of power, violence, and the fatal dividends of white supremacy, and yet, the gravity of the narrative rests in the (un)telling that precedes it. Meaning is made through what the authors leave shrouded in mystery and songly innuendo—the Afro-Horn, the childlike rhyme, and the intentional spaces between words/notes that implore the invited to listen deeper. ¹⁰ The abrupt deaths of our stories’ antagonists is merely a marker of chaos interrupted by the music’s clarity.

Here as with much of Wilson’s drama, song is not simply subject, but method, where the undertow of Black mythologies (old and newly imagined) move the story against the surface of a traditional Western dramatic arc and the social structure it reflects. Like the power of the juba in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, or the play-within-a-play in Gem of the Ocean, “plot” is subsided by ritual and linear time subsumed by continuum, sweeping the characters and their audience back into itself. ¹¹ The Homecoming also offered an early glimpse of a recurring theme for Wilson in subsequent plays and speeches—the unaccounted costs of the Great Migration and the illusory promise of an integrated urban industrial north. ¹²

For Wilson, the flashes of his own memory that show up in his plays are not only from his childhood and young adult life walking the streets of the Hill District, but also the pathways through time that precede his birth, the traces of his family’s ancestral movements from the foothills of western North Carolina to those of western Pennsylvania. Adamant in his position as an artist (and not a historian) who deliberately avoided research in his playwriting, Wilson called on the blues and the “blood memory” for inspiration, resulting in drama that starkly mirrors occurrences in his own family history that he may have not been consciously aware of during his life — such as the enslaved ancestor who inherited a piano upon buying his own freedom, a striking similarity to the plot of The Piano Lesson. ¹³

Like his fictional survivors of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Wilson applied the lessons from blues people with a fierce protection of his art, exercising relative autonomy and control over many of his plays throughout their development and staging. The playwright desired to round out his scripts on Jefferson and Ma Rainey into a trilogy about the lives of Black musicians, but a later play about Otis Redding went unwritten. ¹⁴

* * *

August Wilson’s Blue Imaginary is a playlist that sketches what may have been in Wilson’s record collection today, based on some of the specific tracks that directly inspired the playwright and show up in dialogue (“Nobody In Town”, “Rabbit Foot Blues”, “Still a Fool”, “Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage”), as well as themes, stories, and ideas (“Northbound Blues”, “The Jitney Man”), and music from across the decades and specific places referenced in the plays.

Like the blues moving across time and genre, it connects the contemporary (Erykah Badu, Mereba, Talibah Safiya), and emphasizes instruments such as the transcendent blues guitar (Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Hazel, and Gary Clark Jr.), the piano/organ (James Booker, Jimmy Smith), the blues poets (Gil Scott Heron), the sound and musicians associated with his ancestral home in the hills of North Carolina (Nina Simone), and legends that came out of Pittsburgh (George Benson, Ahmad Jamal, Betty Davis, Earl Hines, Errol Garner, Mary Lou Williams, Syreeta).

Though Wilson would say that he was initially not a fan of jazz (“it ain’t got no words!”), he would find the blues here, too, on an October night among a crowd of people formed on the street in the Hill District:

“So I run down there and I say, “Hey, man, what’s happening?” and they go, “Shhh!” And they were listening to John Coltrane out of the Crawford Grill, you see. And the people inside the Crawford Grill—’cause the drinks cost ninety cents, in ’66 that’s a lot of money—the people inside, they don’t even know how to spell John Coltrane’s name. They inside talking about what they gonna do Friday night and so-and-so’s cousin got a new Lincoln Continental, you see. John Coltrane ain’t playing to them, man, he playing to the brothers out on the street, ’cause the music’s coming straight out over their heads and out on the street. And the brothers outside, they prayin. This is their music. This is what has enabled them to survive these outrageous insults that American society has forced on them.

So when I saw two hundred niggas stunned into silence by the power of art in the music of John Coltrane and his exploration of man’s relation to the divinity, that’s when I got interested in jazz. And also, as a young man wanting to be a writer, I said, This is what I want my art to do. I want to accomplish that.” ¹⁵

This was Wilson encountering the blues living by another name, something he would masterfully recreate himself for the stage. By placing decades of Black life side-by-side (like the cycle) the constants and connections across generation become more clear. It’s the rhythm and the ways we have played according to knowledge and circumstance.

1. An in-depth and foundational analysis of Wilson’s plays, see Sandra Shannon’s The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson

2. Wilson claimed his “four B’s” as inspiration, the collagist and Pittsburgh kin, Romare Bearden; the writers Amiri Baraka and Jorge Luis Borges, and of course, the blues. Bearden’s collages are the direct inspiration of multiple Wilson plays, including Fences (“Continuities”), Joe Turners Come & Gone (“Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket” and “Miss Bertha and Mr. Seth”), and The Piano Lesson (“The Piano Lesson”).

3. The Homecoming script and adjoining materials courtesy of August Wilson Archives and the Kuntu Repertory Theatre Collection at the University of Pittsburgh Archives & Special Collections. Kuntu was founded in 1974, a program of the newly formed Black studies department at Pitt. Kuntu means “mode.”

4. A fuller description of the children’s game “Aunt Jenny Died” and its history can be found at Pancocojams, a blog of Pittsburgh storyteller and culture-keeper Azizi Powell. 

5. Laurence Glasco, “Chapter IX: "I Can't Take It!": August Wilson Leaves Pittsburgh”. August Wilson Journal, Vol. 1 (2019) Spring

6. Shannon, pg. 26

7. Miles Marshall Lewis, “An Interview with August Wilson“. The Believer

8. From the preface and theme of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, one’s “song” can be described, like the blues, as the enduring purpose that connects them across time, ancestors to future

9. I deeply appreciate Harmony Holiday on Dumas, “The Afro-Horn Was the Newest Axe to Cut the Deadwood of the World.” Black Music and Black Muses.

10. Comparing Wilson and Dumas as folklorists and cultural aestheticians, “Both authors refuse to decode their narratives or the conceit of their tales for the reader. Instead, the reader must become a participant in the narrative and recognize for him/herself the significance of the ancestor to the present and the necessity of its presence for a prosperous future” from Dana A. Williams “Making The Bones Live Again: A Look at the Bones People in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and Henry Dumas’s “Ark of Bones”. College Language Association Journal

11. Riffing off Paul Carter Harrison’s essay introductions “Black Theatre In Search of a Source” to Kuntu Drama, “Black Theatre in the African Continuum: Word/Song as Method” to Totem Voices, and “August Wilson’s Blues Poetics” in August Wilson: Three Plays

12. August Wilson, “The Ground On Which I Stand”

13. The recently published biography August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan is the largest volume to date specifically on Wilson’s life and offers some intriguing details about Wilson’s family

14. St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch

15. Lewis, An Interview With August Wilson

Tracklist (alphabetical by artist):

Ahmad Jamal - Excerpts from the Blues

Ali Farka Touré, Taj Mahal - Mahini Me

Andy Bey - Celestial Blues

B.B. King, Tracy Chapman - The Thrill Is Gone

Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong - St. Louis Blues

Bessie Smith - Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine

Betty Davis - Anti Love Song

Big K.R.I.T., BJ The Chicago - Life

Billie Holiday - I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues

Bill Withers - Grandma’s Hands

BJ The Chicago Kid, Kendrick Lamar - His Pain

Blind Boy Fuller - Truckin’ My Blues Away

Blind Lemon Jefferson - Rabbit Foot Blues

Bobbi Humphrey - Black and Blues

Bobby “Blue” Bland - Ain’t No Love In The Heart of the City

Brian Jackson - Path to Macondo / Those Kind of Blues

Charles Mingus - Wednesday Night Prayer

Charlie Parker - Cool Blues

Cymande - Dove

D’Angelo - Devil’s Pie

Earl Hines & His Orchestra - The Jitney Man

Eddie Hazel - I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

Erroll Garner - Erroll’s Blues

Erykah Badu - Green Eyes

Erykah Badu - Out My Mind, Just In Time

Esther Phillips - And I Love Him (Live at Freddie Jetts)

Gary Clark Jr. - If Trouble Was Money - Live

Gary Clark Jr. - Bright Lights - Live

Gary Clark Jr. - When My Train Pulls In - Live

George Benson - The Changing World

Gil Scott-Heron - Lady Day and John Coltrane

Gil Scott-Heron - Gun

James Booker - St. Jame’s Infirmary - Live

James Booker - Papa Was a Rascal - Live

Jimi Hendrix - Who Knows - Live at Filmore East

Jimi Hendrix - Hear My Train a Comin

Jimmy Smith - Root Down (And Get It)

Joe Sample - In All My Wildest Dreams

John Coltrane - Blue World

John Lee Hooker - Ground Hog Blues

Keyon Harrold, Bilal Oliver, Big K.R.I.T. - Stay This Way

Leon Bridges - Blues Mesas

Lowell Fulson - The Train Is Leaving

Maggie Jones - North Bound Blues

Maggie Jones - Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage

Ma Rainey - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Marvin Gaye - Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Mary Lou Williams - My Blue Heaven

Mary Lou Williams - Taurus

Mereba - Kinfolk

Miles Davis, Robert Glasper, Bilal Oliver - Ghetto Walkin’

Muddy Waters - Still a Fool

Muddy Waters - Mannish Boy

Nina Simone - Backlash Blues

Nina Simone - I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl

Nina Simone - Trouble In Mind

Otis Redding - You Don’t Miss Your Water

Otis Redding - Pain In My Heart

Robert Glasper, Erykah Badu, Phonte - Afro Blue

The Roots, Joanna Newsome - Right On

Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Precious Memories

Stevie Wonder - Living For The City

Syreeta - Black Maybe

Taj Mahal - Leaving Trunk

Talibah Safiya - Ten Toes Down

Valerie June - Twined & Twisted

Vieux Farka Touré - Khruangbin

Malik Washington, The Stevland Exchange, December 2023