“What I care about burning in hell? You talking like a fool, burning in hell. Why didn’t God strike some of them crackers down? Tell me that! That’s the question! Don’t come telling me this burning in hell shit! He a man of God — why didn’t God strike some of them crackers down? I’ll tell you why! I’ll tell you the truth! It’s sitting out there as plain as day!”
Boseman pauses for a beat. His lips curl back behind teeth, the venom seeps onto his lips in sheen. “Cause he a White man’s god. That’s why,” he sneers, “God ain’t never listened to no nigger’s prayers. God take a nigger’s prayers and throw them in the garbage. God don’t pay niggers no mind. In fact, God hate niggers! Hate them with all the fury in his heart.”
The Father who allowed his Son to be forced to walk the walk of shame from Gethsemane to Calvary’s Cross is not going to interfere when we find ourselves forced to walk the same walk. Too many fail to understand this. Then when they find themselves on that strait path they lose faith: “20 The one who received the seed that fell on rocky places is the man who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. 21 But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. ” http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/MATT+13.html
Why should we/I be spared what Jesus wasn’t?
In the play/movie we are told God was made in the whiteman’s image.
It helps to know Scripture. We are made in God’s image.
Look in your mirror. There you see the face of God. Whatever shade your skin, whatever gender your being that image you/I see is made in the image of God.
I looked forward to this film immensely. Watching it I am as immensely disappointed.
Not by the performances all of which are on the mark but by the writing which misses the mark.
I learned author August Wilson took the moment of Ma Rainey recording “MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM,” did no research into what actually happened and put into the mouths of his characters what he wanted to have had happened.
This is as bad as the effort of Levee and the white producer to get her to speed up the recording so that it will sell more copies.
Says Ma, “I’m not doing that.”
This is a polemic.
It’s a damn good one but it is still a polemic.
Oppressors, like the oppressed, come in all skin shades and all genders. It is demagoguery to single one out.
Vanity Fair: “I’m glad you brought up Paul Whiteman, a bandleader often criticized for neutering, and whitening, early jazz. The last scene of the film, with the very Whiteman-looking guy stealing the song Boseman’s character wrote, is maybe the greatest jazz-movie diss ever.”
Branford Marsalis: “I don’t think of it as a diss! First, in the play, it isn’t Paul Whiteman. George may have decided it was a person similar to Paul Whiteman, but Whiteman hired a lot of great arrangers and writers—some of them Black. I spent a lot of time listening to Paul Whiteman and still do. It wasn’t my intention to say, “Let’s go get that bastard.” Also, there’s no record of him being part of the system that would steal songs from musicians for $5.
“But there were hundreds of guys like Sturdivant [the film’s record producer character]—guys looking for songs and preying on economically disadvantaged people who didn’t know the business. You know that old Cheech & Chong skit [“Blind Melon Chitlin’”] where they pay the bluesman $10, a bottle of booze, and a hooker?”
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/12/ma-raineys-black-bottom-branford-marsalis-interview
I hoped for better.
I have learned that whatever I have imagined might have been it is always eclipsed by the truth of what was, what is.
Some folks like to say we are all entitled to our opinion. As Harlan Ellison said, “That’s horsepucky. We are entitled to an INFORMED opinion.”
What we/I got here is the equivalent of the sort of thing Veit Harlan made.
The long history of the arts shows that hardly anyone be they a producer or an artist had money. They were almost all scraping by. Many, probably the best, still are.
Like the record producers who recorded Ma Rainey many eventually go broke.
Did they exploit her?
No.
Did they preserve her for the ages and influence for the better countless others through their recordings the metal masters of which were either stolen for crap or dumped in the river when Paramount Recordings went under?
Yes.
“But while Rainey earned a good amount of money, it wasn’t nearly the amount that she deserved. As race records flourished in the 1920s, record companies scrambled to sign Black artists while undermining them and exploiting them at every step. Executives coerced blues singers—especially those who had no experience in the recording industry—to sign away future royalties or even ownership of their songs, leaving many artists destitute after the peak of their popularity.
“And this type of subterfuge was common at Rainey’s label Paramount, despite the fact that it was largely operated by a Black producer, J. Mayo Williams. Williams was known to be just as cutthroat as his white counterparts: he would later say that he subscribed to the industry maxim “screw the artist before he screws you,” and that nine out of 10 Paramount artists received no royalties regardless of their record sales. It was common practice for Williams to buy songs outright from artists for $5 to $20, keep the royalties for himself, and sit back and earn a steady living off them while the artists themselves struggled” https://time.com/5923096/ma-rainey-true-story/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veit_Harlan
