In Joe Turner S Come and Gone Music, I

Cultural Context: Music is Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone music, i.e. song and dance, acts as an important signifier of early 20th century, African-American identity and culture. As Wilson explained in the Preface to King Hedley II (1999):

“From the beginning I decided not to write about historical events or the

pathologies of the black community […] Instead, I wanted to present the

unique particulars of black American culture as the transformations of

impulse and sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural

rituals that defined and celebrated ourselves as men and women of high

purpose.”

As one of the major expressions of this culture, music has an important part to play in the unfolding of the drama. Many of the characters either play an instrument or sing;

Seth plays the harmonica, Jeremy plays the guitar and Zonia and Bynum both sing at various different points in the play.

In act 1, scene 4 the residents of the boarding house perform the “Juba” dance, described in the stage directions as:

“[…] reminiscent of the ring shouts of the African slaves. It is a call and

response dance. BYNUM sits at the table and drums. He calls the dance

as others clap hands, shuffle, and stomp around the table. It should be as

African as possible, with the performers working themselves up into a near frenzy. The words can be improvised, but should include some

mention of the Holy Ghost.”

The Juba dance was originally an African-American plantation dance, brought from

West Africa by slaves who performed it during their gatherings when no rhythm instruments were allowed due to fear of secret codes hidden in the drumming. Within the context of the play, this dance serves as an important reminder to the characters of their shared cultural heritage and history. The ritualistic quality of the spectacle also acts as a catalyst for Loomis’s initial “possession” at the end of this scene. As it is

“reminiscent of the ring shouts of the African slaves,” the dance reminds him of his own previous incarceration at the hands of Joe Tuner and in the larger, more symbolic sense, of the recent historical enslavement of his people in the Deep South.

The blues are also a highly significant in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, for similar reasons to the Juba dance. Indeed the title of the play refers to a line from the refrain of

“Joe Turner" - an early blues song.

Wilson himself has said that:

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural

responses of blacks in America to the situation that they find themselves

in. Contained in the blues is the philosophical system at work. You get

the ideas and attitudes of people as part of the oral tradition. That is a

way of passing along information […] The music provides you an

emotional reference for the information, and it is sanctioned by the community in the sense that if someone sings the song, other people sing

the song.

- August Wilson’s America: A Conversation with Bill Moyers.

Public Affairs Television, 1988

Like the Juba, the blues developed from African American work and sorrow songs.

Field hollers, shouts, yells, and mournful spirituals provided their structural foundation. As they took shape, they began to reflect the emotional content of the lives of black people - essentially their struggle to deal with and to rise above their depressed lifestyles. The blues became a kind of safety valve to release tension and pressure precipitated by daily trials and ongoing, often brutal, discrimination.

In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone the blues, and more particularly each character’s ‘song’ as BYNUM refers to, is inextricably bound up with these implicit associations and serves as a similar kind of cathartic ‘safety valve’, allowing the

‘singer’ to realise the expression of his or her cultural identity. During the final scene

BYNUM says to LOOMIS ‘You bound onto your song. All you got to do is stand up and sing it, Herald Loomis. It’s right there kicking at your throat. All you got to do is sing it. Then you be free.’ Wilson himself has said that the ‘song’ LOOMIS seeks is his African identity: “[…] understanding who you are […] you can [then] go out and sing your song as an African.” (August Wilson’s America: A Conversation with Bill

Moyers.) This is what LOOMIS eventually comes to realise by the end of the drama, as suggested by his penultimate stage directions: “Having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency, fully resurrected,

cleansed and given breath, free from any encumbrance other than the

workings of his own heart and the bounds of the flesh, having accepted

the responsibility for his own presence in the world he is free to soar

above the environs that weighed and pushed his spirit into terrifying

contradictions.”

Course context: how Joe Turner’s Come and Gone relates to other plays on the course

In terms of depictions of African Americans onstage, the drama of August

Wilson represents a significant representational shift. From the initial plays we studied i.e. Eugne O’Neill’s The Emporer Jones, through plays like Lorraine Hansberry’s A

Raisin in the Sun and right up until Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and indeed

Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, the African American community has been represented on the American stage in a number of different lights.

In O’Neill’s play, there is an implicit representational tension, which could be seen to suggest the drama’s underlying racism. Of course O’Neill stage direction describing Lem as an ‘ape-faced old savage of the extreme African type’ is explicitly racist, but his complex depiction of Jones as a rounded and psychologically realistic character, within the play’s overall Expressionist style, was a revelation for white

American audiences at the time. The tension that exists, however, is that while The

Emporer Jones had an undeniable role in making these audiences take black characters – and actors – seriously, it did not itself break down stereotypes. Conversely, Joe

Turner’s Come and Gone is written by an African American and, in some ways, especially for and African American audiences. While character in O’Neill’s The

Emporer Jones can be seen, from one point of view, as a device for depicting emotional states and for representing ideas, in Wilson’s drama it is utilised to embody both cultural history and community.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun performs a similar function, in this way. First premiered nearly 40 years after the premiere of The Emporer Jones, it was still considered to be a risky investment, as the play featured a cast in which all but one minor character were African-American. Similar to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone the play depicts characters who are struggling to assert a uniquely African-American identity and who grapple with the turbulent history and cultural heritage this community has inherited.

In Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, themes of community, identity and race also feature heavily. In Part One: Millenium Approaches, Kushner demonstrates how identity can, in fact, have a divisive power. Louis's callousness about race and his suspicion that Belize is anti-Semitic, in act 3 scene 2, drive a wedge between them, even though they are both also members of the equally marginalised gay community.

Kushner is not sentimental about the ability of identity to connect people automatically, in a subtle difference to Wilson perhaps, since characters like his fictional Roy Cohn do their best to deny their membership in oppressed groups. That denial is of course erased by his eventual death in Part Two: Peristroika, however, caused by AIDS i.e. the disease that “homosexuals have,” as he so puts it. One of the ultimate lessons of Angels in America, however, is that identity need not be discarded for communities to form—the melting pot need not melt. In the epilogue of

Peristroika, for example, the characters are not required to paper over their differences. Quite the contrary: those differences serve as a kind of glue that welds them together. As a community, they are diverse yet mutually dependent. Like

Wilson’s HERALD LOOMIS in the final scene of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, they have become aware of their at times difficult and painful cultural heritage in order that they might enable themselves to look forward to a better and a brighter future.