August Wilson\u27s Joe Turner\u27s Come and Gone

Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money! -Bynum Walker August Wilson considered Joe Turner\u27s Come and Gone (1984) to be his favourite play of the ten in his award-winning Pittsburgh Cycle. It is a drama that truly examines the roots, crossroads, and intersections of African, American, and African American culture. Its characters and choral griots interweave the intricate tropes of migration from the south to the north, the effects of slavery, black feminism and masculinity, and Wilson\u27s theme of finding one\u27s song or identity. This book gives readers an overview of the work from its inception on through its revisions and stagings in regional theatres and on Broadway, exploring its use of African American vernacular genres-blues music, folk songs, folk tales, and dance-and nineteenth-century southern post-Reconstruction history. Ladrica Menson-Furr presents Joe Turner\u27s Come and Gone as a historical drama, a blues drama, an American drama, a Great Migration drama, and the finest example of Wilson\u27s gift for relocating the African American experience in urban southern cities at the beginning and not the end of the African American experience