How ‘The Piano Lesson’ Uses Music to Excavate America’s Dark History of Slavery

For Malcolm Washington, an appreciation for August Wilson plays runs in the family. Several years ago, his father Denzel committed to producing film adaptations of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays — a collection of 10 works, each covering one decade of the Black experience in 20th-century America. Denzel started with the Oscar-nominated Fences, which he also directed and starred in, and followed that with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which won Chadwick Boseman a posthumous Best Actor Oscar nomination. In 2022, Malcolm’s brother, the actor John David Washington, starred in a Broadway revival of The Piano Lesson. And now, the whole Washington family has joined forces on a film adaptation of that 1987 play (streaming on Netflix), with Malcolm directing, his sister Katia executive-producing, and his sister Olivia and mother Pauletta taking roles onscreen alongside John David. The collaboration feels appropriate, given that the story asks big questions about legacy, history, and the burdens and joys of family.

Malcolm Washington first picked up the script in 2020, in the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic. Set in 1930s Pittsburgh, The Piano Lesson follows the Charles family — particularly, two siblings — who are at odds over what to do with an heirloom piano obtained by their enslaved ancestors. Berniece, played in the film by Danielle Deadwyler, wants to keep the instrument to honor its cultural significance. Her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), is a sharecropper who sees the piano as nothing more than a dust collector; he wants to sell it and use the cash to buy his own land. To Washington, the theme of self-discovery through one’s lineage resonated. 

“This idea of legacy and ancestry, of defining yourself or understanding yourself in relation to those that came before you,” he says, “that’s how I came to it, and that’s why it stuck with me, because it lined up with the things that I was considering in my own life.” 

The film, which marks Washington’s directorial debut, is a faithful reproduction, especially when it comes to the use of music. As tensions swell, various cast members sing a medley of slave work songs, blues tunes, and Negro spirituals, creating a tug of war between the past and present as the characters seek to commune with ancestral spirits. The heirloom piano was previously owned by a man named Sutter, who enslaved Berniece and Boy Willie’s relatives. Those revered Charles family ancestors are remembered by carvings in the instrument’s wooden body. 

At the beginning of the film, 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) — congregate at the family home and wrestle with that past. In an effort to confront it, they sing in harmony to “Oh’Berta,” a stirring slave song about the perils of working at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, nicknamed Parchman Farm. With prisoners there laboring from sunup to sundown, it was “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War,” historian David Oshinksy wrote in Worse Than Slavery.

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Stomping their feet, clapping their hands, and slapping the table, the four characters sing of a man confined to Parchman while his lover is free. As the men reflect on the emotional and physical suffering at Parchman through song, it’s like a purging of their collective agony. Washington recalls the emotional ferocity of the performance as the actors grunted and yelled acapella. 

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

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

DESPITE THE FILM’S heaviness, the music occasionally allows for outbursts of joy and laughter too, such as when Erykah Badu’s Lucille, a blues singer, performs the boogie-woogie blues number “Gumbo Head” for a dancing crowd. An original song Badu penned for the film, it is “a call to the music of the period,” Washington says, “but [also] a celebration, bodies moving and dancing. It’s a connection of people across class coming together.”

For Badu, whose blues-inflected voice draws parallels to Billie Holiday, music is inherently spiritual. The Queen of Neo-Soul received her grandmother’s untuned piano at age seven, which she believes led her to sing “slightly out of tune,” she told Rolling Stone by email. The singer added that she doesn’t just connect with her ancestors through her performance, she embodies them. “I believe the ancestors live in those drums,” she wrote, “and we have the power to unlock that frequency any time we intentionally engage.” 

Early blues performers used oral storytelling to chronicle a brutal past experience — or, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “finger its jagged grain” — in an effort to salve wounds. When Wining Boy is missing his deceased wife, Cleotha, he’s drawn to the heirloom piano to perform a drunk rendition of “Hesitating Blues,” a traditional folk song that’s been recorded in different styles by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Janis Joplin, Lena Horne, and Willie Nelson.

“We haven’t spoken enough about the joy that these people find, the laughter that they have between them, how much love is binding this whole thing together,” Washington says of Black life in the Thirties, “and I think so much of that is in the music. Wining Boy, as August writes, is this mix of ‘zest and sorrow.’ And the zest is on top. Zest is first.” 

THE CLIMACTIC MUSICAL number of the film comes as Berniece performs a seance to save her brother Boy Willie from the ghost of Sutter, who the family believes has been haunting them. Composer Alexandre Desplat (Little Women, The Shape of Water) explains that the piano serves as an “altar.” So, as Berniece strikes the keys, uniting with her ancestors engraved on the wooden piano, Desplat chose to emphasize the sound of her pounding on the keys and the pedal, with the notes reduced to an ethereal hum. 

“There’s something that’s happening, very strong and very supernatural,” Desplat explains. “She connects with the past. She connects with the universe, thanks to the piano.”

Washington says Deadwyler’s performance in the scene joins West African spiritual practice and Black Southern Christian tradition as she calls on Mama Berniece, Mama Esther, Papa Boy Charles, and Mama Ola for spiritual guidance. Rather than a gospel hymn to soundtrack the moment, he aimed for a more visceral, earthy melody, something more akin to the discordant piano one might hear in the avant-garde composer Julius Eastman’s scores. Ultimately, Berniece is successful in saving Boy Willie, leading him to recognize the transcendent power of the family’s piano. 

“There’s a physical clash and confrontation,” Washington says. “The core 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 some informed decision about the future.”