Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (Escape Artists, Mundy Lane Entertainment, Netflix, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Friday, December 6), on the last night my husband Charles and I spent with his mother Edi in Martinez, California, the three of us watched a quite good if a bit “precious” movie on Netflix, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It was made in 2020 and was the last feature-film credit for the awesome and tragically short-lived Black actor and star Chadwick Boseman, who’s best known for his role as T’Challa, the Black Panther, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and the 2018 Black Panther film remains far and away the best-ever film based on a comic-book superhero character; Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman is the only other one that even comes close). It’s based on a real-life recording session by the great blues singer Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett Rainey, billed as “Ma Rainey” on her records and nicknamed “Mother of the Blues.” Rainey is played by an equally major star, Viola Davis, though she had a vocal double, Maxayn Lewis, for almost all the film. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (the movie, not the song) began life as a play by August Wilson, one of 10 plays he wrote as the so-called Century Cycle because each one would tell a story from the African-American experience in a specific decade of the 20th century. The film follows a group of musicians assembled in Chicago in 1927 (the opening credit lists July 2 as the date but the actual recording session was in December) to back Ma Rainey on four blues songs: “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Moonshine Blues,” “Hear Me Talking To You” and “Prove It On Me Blues.” (Actually only the first two were recorded in December 1927; “Hear Me Talking” and “Prove It On Me Blues,” the latter an outrageously open Lesbian song in which Rainey declares that the friends she was out with the night before “must have been women, ’cause I don’t like no men,” were from a later Rainey session on June 12, 1928.) The central conflict in the story is between Rainey and Levee (Chadwick Boseman), her trumpet player, who doesn’t like the old-fashioned jug-band music Rainey wants her band to play and dreams of a future in which he leads his own band and plays the kind of sophisticated jazz he dreams of. He’s left a few songs of his own with Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), the white owner of Hot Rhythm Records, for which Rainey records, with vague promises that Sturdyvant will give him his own record deal.

Levee is also cruising Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) even though Dussie Mae is not only Ma’s personal assistant but also her girlfriend de jour. The other musicians in Rainey’s band, trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turman), and bassist “Slow Drag” (Michael Potts), just want to get the records done so they can get paid and get out of the studio. They get tired of Ma’s diva-esque antics, including demanding an ice-cold Coca-Cola before she’ll open her mouth to sing and insisting that her stuttering nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) deliver the spoken introduction to the song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” In one of the film’s most powerful lines Ma says, “They don't care nothin’ about me. All they want is my voice. Well, I done learned that. And they gonna treat me the way I wanna be treated, no matter how much it hurt them.” Sylvester blows six takes of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” with his stuttering, and the one take on which he gets it right doesn’t come out because of a faulty mike cord – and Rainey angrily stalks out of the studio and tells Sturdyvant he has 15 minutes to get the equipment working properly or she’s going to collect her band (except for Levee, whom she’s already decided to fire) and go back to Georgia to tour. While Rainey is out of the studio, Levee has an angry confrontation with Toledo, who gets upset over Levee’s lack of a belief in God. Levee pulls a knife on him and says if there is a God, He will strike the knife from his hand and save Toledo’s life. Later, after the session is finished and Sturdyvant and Ma’s white manager Irwin (Jeremy Shamos), are high-fiving each other and congratulating themselves on making sure-fire hits, Levee stabs Toledo in the back and then watches as Toledo bleeds out and dies in his arms. The final scene shows Sturdyvant in the studio with a white band recording one of Levee’s songs, in an absurdly anemic version, after he’d told Levee that he’d pay him only $5 for each because he didn’t think they had commercial potential.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a flawed movie; Wilson and his screenwriter, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, seem to be trying too hard in getting just about every aspect of racism and anti-Black oppression they could cram into the story. It also doesn’t help that director George C. Wolfe and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler went way overboard on the past-is-brown look, though at least the film is set mostly in confined spaces and that makes it difficult for the actors’ brown faces and the brown backgrounds to blend into each other the way they have in other past-is-brown films whose protagonists are Black (can you say Selma?). What makes this film great despite its overwrought aspects is the finely honed acting, particularly by Davis and Boseman. Davis brings the right note of imperiousness to Rainey’s character; she’s a woman who’s sure of herself and is well aware of her own talents and box-office power. And Boseman is a live wire; he’s not only younger than the other players in Rainey’s band, he’s energetic and determined to make a success on his own terms rather than as accompanist to a singer with a style he considers out of date. (I wondered whether August Wilson was thinking of Louis Armstrong, who as a young man backed Ma Rainey on her most famous song, “See, See Rider,” which she wrote and which later became a blues and rock standard. But the real-life Armstrong never had the kind of chip on his shoulder the fictional Levee did.) Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom also gets at least most of the recording technology right; by 1927 most records were being made electrically (with microphones and a sound console feeding a record-cutting machine), and though electrical technology was central to the process the cutting turntables were still turned by clockwork power because line voltage was not reliable enough to turn the recorder at a constant speed and avoid wow and flutter. Anachronistically, though, the blanks on which the recordings are made are made of lacquer-covered metal instead of wax (as we’re shown in a grim scene in which a wastebasket in the studio fills up from all the takes Sylvester has ruined with his stuttering); lacquer wasn’t introduced until the 1930’s.