‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Director George C. Wolfe on The “Two Crimes” at the End of the Film

The last act of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a coda that puts the whole film into perspective, with two moments of violence laid side-by-side in the closing moments of the film. The first, and more explicit, of the two is Levee (Chadwick Boseman) dramatically stabbing Toledo (Glynn Turman) for standing on his shoe. Of course, the real reason Levee is lashing out is because of the violence he witnessed as a boy in seeing his mother’s rape and his father’s murder at the hands of white men.

Levee spends much of the story flailing and fighting with anyone he comes into contact with, until there is nobody else left to turn to. Having been fired by Ma Rainey he is in a desperate state which leads to him taking a knife and stabbing Toledo, the kindly father figure of the band whose last moments are a haunting mixture of wide-eyed horror and forlorn acceptance of his fate.

This is the final shot in August Wilson’s play, but in the Netflix version of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom director George C. Wolfe adds another thought before the credits roll. In this scene we see a white singer and a group of white jazz musicians in a newer looking studio recording the song that Levee had written and given to Sturdyvant earlier in the film. “I was thinking about how Sturdyvant takes that song, he doesn’t put it in a file, no, he goes ahead and records that song,” George C. Wolfe told Esquire.

“There’s all these incredible stories in popular culture where a black musician or artist comes along and their work or compositions are usurped by a more mainstream white artist,” he added. “Big Mama Thornton sang ‘Hound Dog’, but we don’t know that version, we know the Elvis Presley version.”

“There was a bandleader called Paul Whiteman who did a concert at Carnegie Hall which was billed as, ‘the concert that made a lady out of jazz’, and so at a time when Black artists were making all this really interesting work, it was somehow him that legitimised jazz. So the character in the film is loosely patterned on Paul Whiteman.”

By weaving the erasure of Black music into the story, we see Levee die in a sense as his music is recorded by white men, the very people who started the cycle of his trauma. As Wolfe said, “To me at the end there are two crimes that take place: one of the crimes is Levee and what he does to Toledo, and the other is what happens to his art, and that’s what I wanted to embody.”