• Elham Jalali Karveh

  Author

Music,in particular the blues, has long been affiliated with African-American lives.African-
American identity is inevitably connected with this kind of music as they were the first to begin
singing and playing the blues when working on plantations in order to ease the pain of slavery.
The songs represented the slave’s longing for both spiritual and bodily freedom. As Ralph
Ellison has stated the blues is a mixture of tragedy and comedy, of poetry and ritual. August
Wilson has justly represented the influence of the blues on the lives of his characters in his
Pittsburgh cycle. In this study I trace the effect of the blues in two of these plays, Ma Rainey’s
Black Bottom and Seven Guitars. It is highlighted that the characters are closely connected to
their musical (ancestral) heritage in a way that they see themselves anonymous without this
element. As long as they hold onto this cherished relic, they have a uniqueness that no white man
can change and possess.

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