The voices of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937) loom large in the music of the United States. In life, these performers dominated U.S. vaudeville theater circuits and made 200+ commercial blues records between them (with sales numbering in the millions). In my lifetime, these queer Black women—pioneers in their respective musical fields—have been newly embraced as the type of underrepresented historical figures that can, and should, anchor more inclusive notions of our collective past, present, and future.

The side-by-side streaming of George C. Wolfe's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Dee Rees's Bessie in 2020 brings such efforts into sharp relief. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is the product of an agreement between the estate of U.S. playwright August Wilson and actor Denzel Washington that will facilitate the production of film adaptations of all ten of Wilson's plays. Prior to the 2020 release of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, only Fences and The Piano Lesson had received such treatment—limiting the extent to which Wilson's influential work, and the experiences it illuminates, can be disseminated to a broad public audience.Footnote ¹ Bessie represents a similar commitment to more equitable public representations of Black American music, ultimately requiring more than twenty years to develop as a film and produce. As such, the pairing constitutes a compelling opportunity to examine the role of sound in bringing these powerful stories to life. Both films focus the viewer's attention on the past and present economics of U.S. popular music and associated celebrity. Where Ma Rainey's Black Bottom makes the film's music a window onto another moment in time, Bessie makes music inextricable from the identity and performance of the film's lead.

The film of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom derives most of its atmospheric realism from Branford Marsalis's film score. Indeed, the visual setting for the film is sparse. Suggestive snapshots of select street corners, Ma Rainey's hotel, car, and the industrial backdrop of early twentieth-century Chicago are all that deepen the historic character of the stark brick, concrete, wood-paneled recording studio, and basement rooms in which the bulk of the film's action takes place. Marsalis's scoring makes strategic use of this. The underscoring is provocatively stripped down in similar ways, giving the patter of Wilson's gripping dialogue—adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson and performed by acting powerhouses Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman, and Glynn Turman—additional weight and resonance. Once one's eyes adjust to the noticeable lack of supersaturated, twenty-first-century special effects, one's ears immediately begin to pick up on how the score cues the viewer in to the flow of life that carries the plot along. For instance, impressionistic piano and percussion are all that signal the synchronized, mechanized, rhythms of factory work, which serve as a larger backdrop for life on the Chicago street-corner where the recording studio (the film's primary setting) is located. The underscoring never reaches beyond the forces of a typical backing band for a blues singer of Ma Rainey's caliber, always working in tandem with the probing, spoken reflections that make this work such a powerful take on both the highly expressive sounds of the era and the trials and tribulations of the musicians who made them.

Not all of the music featured in the film is instrumental chiaroscuro. Vocals for the song “Ma Rainey's Black Bottom” help to bring to life the preparation and production of the record, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom—the activity of which serves to drive the plot forward. Soul singer Maxayn Lewis sings for Viola Davis, and rightfully so. The complexity of the August Wilson drama demands strong actors, the performances of which should not be undercut by a voice that does not live up to the larger-than-life persona at the center of the unfolding narrative. The impact of the work's tragic ending makes it hard not to linger over this aspect of the film, though. After bouts of lip-synching and other such musical miming pulls one out of the recording takes of a woman painfully aware of the fact that “All [we] want is [their] voice,” the viewer witnesses the violent undoing of the Levee character—set to the sounds and images of a producer conducting a recording session for Levee's work without Levee and with a replacement all-white ensemble. In other words, while Levee finally succumbs to the despair of unrelenting violence that exists side-by-side with false industry promises of commercial success and economic independence, the producer symbolically reaps the profits of what amounts to a stolen early jazz hit. Perhaps the discomfort of the lip-synching is instructive. We would all be better equipped to address the systemic inequalities of the music industry (and beyond) if listeners heard more of the exploitation that has historically given rise to many classic U.S. records. The choice of backup singer, a former Ikette, is particularly thought-provoking in this regard.Footnote ²

Dee Rees's Bessie takes a different approach. Casting experienced vocalist and former hip-hop star Queen Latifah in the role of the Blues Queen, the production blurs the boundaries between film score and star power. In other words, the music of Bessie does not transport the viewer into the world of the film's subject in the way that the music for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom does. Watching Queen Latifah sing Bessie Smith tunes while reenacting snippets of her life invites the viewer to contemplate more contemporary parallels between the past and present commercial popular music industry than anything else. The actor's own remarks on the experience are compelling for this reason. In an NPR interview, Queen Latifah told Arun Rath:

Later in the same interview, the artist even suggests she shares some aspects of Bessie Smith's approach (despite them each being associated with very different genres), observing, “you can also hear how she jumps between different tempos and rhythms, and that's something I enjoy doing personally with my band members, when we jump from hip-hop to jazz to gospel.”Footnote ⁴ While it can be easy, or convenient, for those cast in biopics to suggest such commonalities between themselves and the people they are playing, these similarities seem essential to the design of Bessie.

Indeed, both the public accolades and critiques of the film seem to hinge on what this apparent narrative discontinuity does to the experience of watching the film. Mekeisha Madden Toby, writer for Essence Magazine, raves about Bessie: “This is arguably the best and most honest depiction of African American life on the network since 2005's Lackawanna Blues.”Footnote ⁵ Reviewers for both the New York Times and the Washington Post, however, struggled to find the same “soul” in the film.Footnote ⁶ As representative “hot takes” on Bessie, these views also make very different demands of the film itself. Toby's rave review is more in line with the director's declared ambitions to “really focus on the relationships…, understand the personal and the public, and to see how different they were from each other and how this woman was fighting on all fronts.”Footnote ⁷ The implications of a remark like this is that the casting of Latifah is a strength more than it is a weakness, presenting in the role someone who has actually experienced some of what Bessie Smith experienced (even if it might detract from the representation of early twentieth-century U.S. music and life in other ways).

Although Rees's goals for the film were ambitious in their own right, it is worth noting that they did not include a promise to illuminate the complexities of the cultural politics that shaped Bessie Smith's world. The other reviewers, however, wanted the film to take the time, or space, for the characters to stand and deliver more of this history. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ways their discussions of the film's portrayal of historical context differ. The New York Times’ reviewer accuses the film of not probing the represented points on the “Bessie Smith timeline” enough. Author Neil Genzlinger observes, “Real-life figures (and the actors who play them) make cameos that feel included merely to drop the name rather than to develop historical context.”Footnote ⁸ The Washington Post review includes “feelings about the white and black cultural arbiters who felt it was their job to judge [Bessie Smith's] authenticity” in his characterization of the film's “lack of focus,” which, in author Hank Stuever's view, should have been limited to “just one period or narrative hook in Smith's life.”Footnote ⁹ Toby's review highlights just such a seemingly underdeveloped plot point, or element of biopic overstuffing, as a highlight. In their view, the brief cameo by the white author and critic associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten, provides a valuable sounding board for Latifah's portrayal of Bessie Smith. Specifically, it is an opportunity for the main subject of the film to say, “White folks in the South don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too big. And white folks in the North don't care how big you get as long as you don't get too close.”Footnote ¹⁰ The distinct lack of character development—Van Vechten registers only as a relative stranger at a cocktail party—is what allows this remark to really land.

All this begs the question: what are the duties, or responsibilities, of a biopic? Where Bessie casts an artist who has faced many of the same challenges as its titular character in Queen Latifah's own field of Hip-Hop, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom embraces “historical accuracy” in a way that pushes the recorded performances of the character into the musical background. Aesthetic differences aside, both films adopt supplementary views of the impact of celebrity on both women. Bessie first brings the viewer into the life of the Empress of the Blues in a moment of intense vulnerability. Bathed in spotlight, at the mercy of the audience before which she appears, the character is then wrenched into her present by the slap of a man in a dark alley. Even at her most successful, the character of Bessie Smith is tinged with uncertainty—a duality set off most provocatively by a scene in which she stares pensively at herself in the mirror wearing nothing but the makeup and jewels that complete her stage look. By contrast, Ma Rainey appears outwardly uncertain in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, when she appears at all. Although the sounds of her records are heard almost immediately, the character does not speak, and thus does not appear as herself, until about thirty minutes into the film. When she finally does appear, the character is quick to anger and her antics in the recording studio suggest she is easily threatened by the men in her life. As the drama progresses, however, the viewer comes to realize that this outward persona is the result of painful insight and ploys to make the most of the limited power her commercially lucrative voice gives her to wield. Although difficult viewing at times, the relative richness of the portrayed vulnerabilities of both of these characters is powerful. From this vantage point, both films offer fitting lessons in early twentieth-century United States blues for our turbulent present. The towering strength of these women is inspiring, but their more human qualities are what hold us accountable as we consume their stories.