African American Music In August Wilson's The Piano Lesson

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In August Wilson’s novel, The Piano Lesson, African American music played a major role. Throughout the play the characters would sing many different genres of music. They sang songs that were from the blues era, and they included some jazz within the play. August Wilson, the author of The Piano Lesson, illustrates the importance that African American music and the instruments that they played had upon their culture. The play The Piano Lesson, has several historical elements that have important meanings to the family. The characters in this play shows that no matter what has happened in the past to their ancestors that they will keep their tradition. Bernice keeping the piano that was traded for her grandmother shows that she cares a lot about …show more content…

The characters in the novel played all genres of music off a piano which they sang along to. In many scenarios, Winning Boy would begin to play music off the piano and began to sing which made the others join in with him. The first genre of music that he played was blues. The blues song that Winning Boy played was more of a slow tempo song. Although Elijah Wald, the author of, The Blues: A Very Short Introduction, makes a statement that blues was more of a slower tempo type music during the earlier years and the tempo began to speed up as years passed by (Wald 2). The tempo was not so slow that it would have been considered a sad song (Wald 2). Wald states, “This twelve-bar blues is ideally suited to the West African traditions of a call-to-response, in which a lead of voice or instrument states a phrase that is answered by other voices or players” (Wald 2). The statement explains that the genre blues started in Africa (Wald 2). Africans started the blues movement within this music and later during the years the music was recreated by people of other ethnics (Wald 2). The main African American style which would be described as a fusion of blues was brought by the ex-slaves right after the emancipation (Wald 82). It was not until the 1920s when African Americans were allowed to record any of their blues records (Wald 83). Blues could have been presented with many different rhythms. The rhythms could range from slow to moody to an even faster piece (Wald

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