Prompt 2: The Piano Lesson and the Blues
The blues is described as a uniquely African American musical tradition, combining folk music, traditional work songs once sun by slaves, jazz, and other musical traditions to describe both personal suffering and to create an oral history of all individuals who have sung it. In August Wilson’s 1986 play The Piano Lesson, an heirloom piano comes to embody the blues tradition for its central protagonists Boy Willie and his sister Berniece. Whether to transform the piano into money, as Boy Willie wishes to do, or to save it, becomes symbolic of the role of the blues in African American history and society. The blues, like the piano itself, is problematic because of its ties to the history of slavery, but it cannot be nor should not be eradicated, given the loss this will create for the community.
The piano was carved by African American slave, and is an important part of the family legacy and history. While the family are sharecroppers during the Great Depression, and facing dire economic straits on one hand, the piano contains carved images of the family’s ancestors, symbolizing a vital link with the past Bernice believes must be preserved (44). Bernice, interestingly enough, is not a musician herself. One character explicitly says, Berniece “don’t play that type of music,” that was once heard coming from the piano, in other words the ancestral music of the blues (57). But Berniece still feels a connection and a bond the piano that other characters in the play do not, even though the piano’s legacy is mixed.
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