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Monologue from "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by August Wilson
Show title:
American Masters
Video title:
Monologue from "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" by August Wilson
Video duration:
0m 47s
Video description:
"White folks don’t understand about the blues," says Ma Rainey in the play, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927. This dramatic reading created for August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand is performed by Ebony Jo-Ann. The play premiered in 1984 at Yale Repertory Theatre and opened on Broadway the same year to win a New York Drama Critics Circle award.
Reed was always at the forefront of American avant-garde music, beginning with creation of the Velvet Underground in 1965. Gritty and realistic, the brutal honesty in Reed’s lyrics and sound made him a cultural icon of the disenfranchised throughout the ’60s and ’70s. From punk rock to grunge, he has had an unparalleled influence on the American music scene.
Bebop, a style of jazz developed in the 1940's, changed American music but wasn't taken seriously for much of Charlie Parker's life. This mid-century popcorn television commercial shows how the public's perception of bebop was riddled with stereotypes.
Charlie Parker's nickname "Yardbird" came to be while he was on the way to a gig with some fellow musicians and involved a bird in a yard that had an unfortunate fate.