The 4 B's of Inspiration: Borges, Bearden, Baraka & The Blues

by Moira O'Sullivan

In a 1999 interview with The Paris Review, August Wilson explained that a lot of his work was influenced by what he called his “four Bs”: painter Romare Bearden, playwright Amiri Baraka, poet Jorge Luis Borges, and the blues. The influence of these interdisciplinary inspirations is evident in many of Wilson’s plays and helped him on his own creative journey from poet to playwright. Never formally trained in theater, Wilson’s natural curiosity and his Pittsburgh public library card led him to find his voice and the medium for which he is now known. As he told The Paris Review: “From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays. From Romare Bearden, I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.” Read on for more background on the works that made Wilson.

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden (1911–1988) was an American painter who grew up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. He is famous for his vibrant collages showing Harlem life mixed with imagery of the American South. Inspired by family friends Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, and Duke Ellington, Bearden’s artwork is centered on the African American experience. He was also a civil rights activist who was deeply involved in the Black Arts Movement that spawned the Black Revolutionary Theatre.

Wilson credits Bearden’s work as his primary influence for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) and The Piano Lesson (1987). Bearden’s collage Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (1978), from his Pittsburgh Memories collection, specifically inspired Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. In the painting, you can see the boarding house that Wilson used as his setting. He then drew upon the people in the painting to create characters Seth and Bertha, the boarding house’s owners. Wilson’s poetry in the early 1970s also shows traces of Bearden’s collection of collages The Prevalence of Ritual, which he had seen in a National Geographic magazine.

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was an African American playwright well known for his Obie Award–winning play Dutchman (1964), which told the story of a Black man and a White woman who have a racially-charged confrontation in a New York City subway car. He wrote powerful political plays as well as poetry, and was a huge advocate for social justice in the Black community. As Wilson first transitioned from poet to theatermaker, he directed many of Baraka’s plays with the Black Revolutionary Theatre. Baraka once said, “August was a poet when we first talked. He didn’t write plays yet; he was a young poet talking to me about poetry and I thought that [his movement into the theater] was a miraculous kind of development.”

Jorge Luis Borges

“The foundation of my playwriting is poetry,” Wilson once said, and Borges’ work is definitely part of that foundation. Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who wrote short stories, poetry, and Spanish translations of fiction. Wilson explained his fascination with Borges’ writing in an interview with Mark William Rocha, saying, “It’s the way Borges tells a story. In Borges, it’s not what happens, but how. A lot of times, he’ll tell you what’s going to happen up front. All of the interest is in how the story is going to be told.” Borges’ fiction is known for having fantastical elements, or, as he described it, “the contamination of reality by dream.” Wilson utilizes Borgesian techniques, also known as magical realism, in Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, with the presence of ghosts, trips to the past, and other magical moments.

The Blues

The Blues is a musical genre rooted in African rhythms, African American slave songs, and spirituals. It is also the basis of other musical forms like jazz, country, soul, and rock. Characterized by a melancholy, somber tone, The Blues is lyrical rather than narrative, and expresses feelings more than telling linear stories. Most blues songs focus on oppression, heartbreak, and surviving the hard times in life.

Wilson’s passion for this type of music is apparent in many of his plays, as we see his characters find their own voice and live their own song. The title Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a W.C. Handy blues song, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) centers on blues performer

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and her fellow musicians in Chicago. As mentioned in How I Learned What I Learned, singer Bessie Smith was a major influence on Wilson, particularly her song

“Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll

Like Mine,” which made him realize that poetry can be found in everyday conversation. He then channeled the poetry into his own dialogue.