How The Piano Lesson uses music to confront our history of slavery

For Malcolm Washington, appreciation for August Wilson’s pieces runs in the family. A few years ago, his father Denzel committed to producing film adaptations of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays – a collection of ten works, each covering a decade of the black experience in 20th century America. Denzel started with the Oscar nomination Fenceswhich he also directed and starred in, and followed with Ma Rainey’s black asswhich earned Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In 2022, Malcolm’s brother, actor John David Washington, starred in a Broadway revival of The piano lesson. And now the entire Washington family has teamed up for a film adaptation of this 1987 play (streaming on Netflix), with Malcolm directing, his sister Katia serving as executive producer, and his sister Olivia and mother Pauletta taking on screen roles alongside John David. The collaboration seems appropriate considering the story asks big questions about family heritage, history, and the burdens and joys.

Malcolm Washington first picked up the script in 2020 in the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s set in 1930s Pittsburgh The piano lesson follows the Charles family – specifically two siblings – as they disagree about what to do with an heirloom piano given to their enslaved ancestors. Berniece, played by Danielle Deadwyler in the film, wants to keep the instrument to reflect its cultural significance. Her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), is a sharecropper for whom the piano is nothing more than a dust collector; he wants to sell it and use the money to buy his own land. For Washington, the theme of self-discovery through one’s own ancestry played a major role.

“This idea of ​​legacy and lineage, of defining or understanding yourself in relation to those who came before you,” he says, “That’s how I got into it, and that’s why it stuck with me, because it resonated with the things I was thinking about in my own life.”

The film, which marks Washington’s directorial debut, is a faithful rendition, particularly in its use of music. As tensions rise, various cast members sing a medley of slave labor songs, blues tunes and Negro spirituals, creating a tug-of-war between past and present as the characters attempt to communicate with the spirits of their ancestors. The heirloom piano previously belonged to a man named Sutter, who enslaved Berniece and Boy Willie’s relatives. These revered ancestors of the Charles family are commemorated by carvings in the wooden body of the instrument.

As the film opens, four men – Uncle Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), professional pianist Wining Boy Charles (Michael Potts), Boy Willie and Boy Willie’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) – gather at the family home and wrestle with it Past. To combat this, they sing in harmony “Oh’Berta,” a stirring slave song about the dangers of working at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. Because prisoners had to toil there from sunrise to sunset, it was “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War,” wrote historian David Oshinksy Worse than slavery.

The four characters stomp their feet, clap their hands and pound the table, singing of a man bound to Parchman while his lover is free. When the men reflect in song on the emotional and physical suffering at Parchman, it is like a cleansing of their collective torment. Washington remembers the emotional intensity of the performance, as the actors grunted and shouted a cappella.

“If you are in Mississippi at this time, you or someone you know has probably spent time, especially if you are a man, at Parchman Farm at the Mississippi State Penitentiary,” Washington said. “If you know the lyrics to this song, you are connected to that pain and that trauma. And so much of this moment is about processing that, right? It’s about facing that feeling and processing it.”

For author Virgil Williams, who adapted the play for the screen, the performance not only symbolizes resistance, but also represents how each character has the opportunity to liberate themselves through song. “We’re going to take this pain and make it into a song,” Williams says. “And what we experience throughout the play is an exorcism of all that trauma.”

Despite the film’s harshness, the music occasionally allows for bursts of joy and laughter, such as when Erykah Badu’s blues singer Lucille plays the boogie-woogie blues number “Gumbo Head” to a dancing crowd. An original song written by Badu for the film. It’s “a call to the music of that time,” says Washington, “but (also) a celebration of bodies moving and dancing. It’s a connection of people from all classes coming together.”

For Badu, whose blues-infused voice has parallels with Billie Holiday, music is inherently spiritual. The queen of neo-soul was given her grandmother’s untuned piano when she was seven, which she said caused her to sing “slightly out of tune,” she said Rolling Stone by email. The singer added that through her performance, she not only connects with her ancestors but also embodies them. “I believe that the ancestors live within these drums,” she wrote, “and we have the power to unlock this frequency every time we intentionally tune into it.”

Early blues artists used oral storytelling to record a brutal past experience—or, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “to feel its jagged grains”—in an effort to heal wounds. When Wining Boy misses his late wife Cleotha, he is drawn to the heirloom piano to drunkenly play “Hesitating Blues,” a traditional folk song performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Janis Joplin, Lena Horne, and Willie Nelson.

“We haven’t talked enough about the joy that these people feel, the laughter that they have with each other, how much love holds the whole thing together,” Washington says of the life of black people in their 30s, “and I think about it so much .” that’s in the music. Wining Boy is, as August writes, this mixture of “joie de vivre and sadness.” And the spice is on top. Joie de vivre comes first.”

The film’s climactic musical number comes when Berniece performs a séance to save her brother Boy Willie from the ghost of Sutter, who the family believes is haunting them. Composer Alexandre Desplat (Little women, The shape of water) explains that the piano serves as an “altar”. As Berniece strikes the keys and unites with her ancestors engraved on the wooden piano, Desplat chooses to emphasize the sound of her strikes on the keys and pedal, reducing the notes to an ethereal hum.

“Something happens, very strong and very supernatural,” explains Desplat. “It connects with the past. Thanks to the piano, she connects with the universe.”

According to Washington, Deadwyler’s appearance in the scene combines West African spiritual practice and the Christian tradition of the black southern states by asking Mama Berniece, Mama Esther, Papa Boy Charles and Mama Ola for spiritual guidance. Instead of a gospel hymn to accompany the moment, he aimed for a more soulful, earthy melody that was more akin to the dissonant piano one might hear in the scores of avant-garde composer Julius Eastman. Ultimately, Berniece manages to save Boy Willie, leading him to realize the transcendent power of the family piano.

“There is a physical collision and a confrontation,” Washington says. “At the heart of it all is confrontation – confronting parts of your identity, confronting parts of your history, confronting parts of your ancestry so that you can make an informed decision about the future.”