Seven Guitars

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1995

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Guitars and Music

The title of the play refers to the seven characters. The supporting characters, three men and three women, are each unique and complex. They harmonize like chords and play counterpoint while Floyd drives the melody line. The image of the guitar, intertwined with the repeated motif of music, is one of the most significant symbols in the play. Music and singing are embedded in the history of Black culture from slavery forward and interwoven into the fabric of not only Seven Guitars, but the other plays in the Century Cycle. The play begins and ends with singing, and most of the characters express themselves through song at some point. In the 1940s, Black people had few avenues to rise above poverty and obscurity or to obtain social power, and these routes were primarily through sports and entertainment. Jazz developed as a Black art form, derived from African rhythms and musical structures and influenced by European harmony. White audiences began to consume jazz, simultaneously continuing to discriminate against the Black musicians who wrote and performed it.

Due to racial oppression, Floyd can only achieve fame and fortune by submitting to the exploitation of appropriative White power structures that control the recording and distribution of his music. With his first hit single, Floyd has proven himself as having the potential to become a very popular musician. But the record label sees him as disposable, willing to profit from his music but unwilling to take the risk of investing in Floyd as a musician. Therefore, without their help, Floyd must pull himself up by his bootstraps to make it to Chicago and record. The pawning of Floyd’s guitar, his central means for making music, for a mere ten dollars, speaks to the ongoing desperation of Floyd’s poverty. Despite his tested talent and ability, every attempt to improve his situation enough to get to Chicago collapses beneath him. To Floyd, a guitar is a delicate, sensitive implement and he recognizes that he can only succeed with the right instrument—his electric guitar.

In the play’s decade, electric guitars are a recent innovation, having come about in the 1930s and 40s. The electrified amplification of the guitar changed the way the guitar was played in jazz, allowing the guitar to be heard more prominently. The concept of the lead singer was also relatively new. The electric guitar is part of what makes Floyd the standout star of the band. Floyd’s three guitars—the old guitar, the (offstage, pawned) electric guitar, and the brand-new guitar he buys with his robbery money—represent the three phases of his career and accompanying life. The old guitar is the past, which is why he left it with Vera when he went to Chicago. The pawned guitar represents the recording of his first song, a time in which he nearly achieved stardom but didn’t quite make it. This guitar is beyond his reach, gone like Pearl Brown. The new, expensive guitar is his very short future. With the same guitar that Muddy Waters plays, Floyd hits the peak of his playing, is engaged to the woman he loves, and can finally go to Chicago. However, with this image of stardom complete, Hedley mistakes him for Buddy Bolden and kills him.

The Rooster

Throughout the first act, Mrs. Tillery’s rooster crows frequently at inappropriate moments, annoying most of characters. Roosters, which have long stood as a symbol of masculinity, become protective and often aggressive in the presence of hens. They crow to signal their dominance as a warning to other roosters and delineate their territory. Although they are most well-known for crowing right before dawn, roosters crow throughout the day as a form of communication, and sometimes in response to the crowing of other roosters. Hedley, who keeps chicken and turkeys, has an experienced understanding of the way the birds relate to each other. He draws a comparison between roosters and Black men, asserting that both are kings. According to Hedley, roosters and Black men are both becoming extinct. Figuratively, Hedley is referring to growing complacency and assimilation that has distracted Black men from rebelling.

As industrialization has engulfed Pittsburgh, the rooster has no place. Louise, who also finds men to be useless, complains that Mrs. Tillery’s rooster could be replaced with an alarm clock. The men in the play enact attempts at dominance, particularly over the women, but Floyd is the most dominant, the supreme rooster. His return heightens the masculine competition between the men and causes both Red and Canewell to back away from Vera. Floyd establishes his place as the head of the pecking order, and Canewell and Red eventually fall in line, agreeing to follow him to Chicago. But to Hedley, Floyd and the other two men have become too comfortable with their place in racial oppression, trying to succeed in White society rather than becoming kings of their own kingdoms.

At the end of Act I, Hedley becomes agitated as the rest of the characters complain about the rooster next door. He exclaims that the rooster’s job is to wake them up and spur them into action to remind them that they’re alive, but the men don’t want or deserve the rooster because they won’t rise up and live. Hedley kills the rooster in the same way that he will kill Floyd, a warning and a sacrifice, using the rooster’s blood to create a ritualistic circle. Afterward, Hedley begins to assert his own dominance. He forces himself on Ruby, the youngest and likely the most fertile of the women, until she accepts him and decides to make Hedley her baby’s father. Hedley brandishes a machete to keep White men from encroaching his territory. And when he sees Floyd holding money, unearthed from the territory that Hedley is claiming, he fights and kills him.

Names and Inheritances

One of the long-lasting traumas from American slavery was the constant severing of familial lines. Inherited identities and cultures were crushed over multiple generations as families were separated. Some slave owners would rename their slaves, and enslaved people often had private names as well as the names they were given. After emancipation, many former slaves chose their own new names, adopting surnames that, despite common misconception, were often not the surnames of the slaveholders who last owned them. Names became a significant way of establishing selfhood and self-ownership and formulating families. The practice of self-naming to shed “slave names” has continued, heightening during the Civil Rights and Black nationalism movements. Names have strong symbolism in the play in terms of Black identity and cultural assertion.

Canewell, who is the character who is most likely to back down or walk away when challenged, maintains a name that came directly from slavery when someone commented that his grandfather, who was cutting sugarcane, could “cane well” (25). The characters sometimes refer to Floyd by his full stage name, Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton. This nickname infantilizes Floyd, reflecting the dependence of his musical career upon White record executives. And when Floyd receives the letter from the record label, he brags to Vera that they addressed him as Mister, which signifies respect as if their respect proves his worthiness. When Red’s wife gives birth to a son, she names him Mister, demanding that respect from anyone who addresses him. Hedley understands this because his first name is King for King Buddy Bolden.

Hedley discusses the burden of the name, describing a time when he had killed another man for refusing to call him by his first name. Hedley blames this incident and subsequent prison time for the fact that he ended up with no wife or children, much like the real Buddy Bolden. Hedley is obsessed with the idea of inheritance. His father had passed on Bolden’s name to Hedley, and Hedley believes, based on a dream, that his father left him a larger inheritance in the hands of Bolden (who died in 1931). Hedley desperately wants his own heir, which Ruby decides to provide when she plans to name her child after him. And while Hedley is the heir of Bolden’s name, Floyd is his musical heir, poised to become immortalized through jazz. However, after Hedley kills Floyd to claim his supposed inheritance, Hedley seems haunted. He lets the crumpled money drop through his fingers and sings about Buddy Bolden, as if the dream of the inheritance was much more powerful than a handful of money.