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The Black Bottom Where Levee's About to Break

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In the end, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom moves into the terrain of tragedy. The trauma of internalized rage raises its ugly head, and even though it provides clinical "insight" into the insufferable nature of the African-American experience, there's no relief, and even the great Ma Rainey is, in the end, reduced in Wolfe's closing scene to a deeply moving and silent melancholy. It's a genuine moment (the aforementioned affection for Dussie being the other) where she's not fronting, not putting up resistance to the pressure of being Black in a white-owned world. As she rides off in a cab near the end of career, like a punch drunk boxer, Wolfe sticks in the final shiv -- an image of an all-white band playing Levee's tour de force composition, moving the music of the soul from the blues into R&B, for which Levee has been paid a pittance.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is now streaming on Netflix and is a highly recommended film. Ma Rainey's oeuvre is available on YouTube.

(Article changed on January 1, 2021 at 09:08)

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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