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Toward the end of August Wilson's exquisite play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (revived at the Royale, under the deft direction of Marion McClinton), the eponymous Delta blues singer, whose low throaty contralto broadcasts her impudence and her independence, turns to her session musicians and opines about the blues (which the real Rainey claimed to have christened in 1902 on a tent-show junket). "White folks don't understand about the blues," she says. "They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life." The blues are catastrophe ...