Seven Guitars is a 1995 play by American playwright August Wilson. It focuses on seven African-American characters in the year 1948. The play begins and ends after the funeral of one of the main characters, showing events leading to the funeral in flashbacks. Seven Guitars represents the 1940s entry in Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade anthology of African-American life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the twentieth century; Wilson would revisit the stories of some of these characters in King Hedley II, set in the 1980s.
The play begins with the characters mourning the death of their friend, blues singer Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton in the backyard of Vera's split-level apartment, where she, Louise, and Hedley live. After the first scene, the play proceeds with the events of the previous week.
Just released from 90 days in a workhouse (on a trumped-up charge of vagrancy), Floyd returns to his former lover Vera's apartment. Vera distrusts Floyd after his relationship with another woman during a recording session in Chicago. That recording sessionâÂÂwith guitarist Canewell and drummer Red CarterâÂÂresulted in Floyd's first hit song, "That's All Right," which plays throughout the play. Vera rejects Floyd's invitation to come to Chicago with him as he records a follow-up song. Louise receives a letter from her niece Ruby, who writes that she's moving north from Alabama after relationship issues.
Hedley, who raises and slaughters fowl in the backyard, has an advanced tuberculosis infection. He reproaches Louise for recommending he go to the local, newly integrated, sanitarium, believing that he'll be a "big man" when an angelic Buddy Bolden grants him a promised family fortune. CanewellâÂÂresenting Floyd for his budding stardom and fearing Chicago's over-zealous policeâÂÂrebuffs Floyd's invitation to record more music in Chicago.
The next day, Louise talks with Vera, and supports her suspicions of Floyd, recounting her own relationship with a flighty man. Red Carter arrives with cigars to celebrate the birth of his son with Canewell and Floyd. They sing and discuss women, going to Chicago, and guns, with Hedley intermittently joining the conversation, including to argueâÂÂagainst Red Carter and Floyd's notion of self-advancement in the absence of an active GodâÂÂthat the Bible foretells a black vengeance against oppressive whites a la the Lion of Judah. Later, the characters gather to listen to a Joe Louis fight on the radio.
As the characters are chatting and playing whist following the fight, Ruby unexpectedly arrives, drawing both Canewell and Red Carter's flirtation. They discuss the neighbor's rooster, noting how out of place and annoying its crowing is in the city environment. Despite saying that the rooster is the king of the barnyard, like the black man, Hedley suddenly retrieves the rooster and slits its throat with his tools. The first act ends with his monologue about how the group's complaining about the rooster and its antiquated role meant that they no longer deserved it, drawing comparisons to black men in toto.
Ruby and Hedley talk, with Hedley recounting how he killed a man for not calling him "King," a nameâÂÂbased on Buddy BoldenâÂÂthat his father called him. He propositions Ruby to give him a child, but she declines due to the age gap. Floyd faces down bureaucratic intransigence from the workhouseâÂÂwhich owes him $0.30 pay for each day there, but which requires a specific formâÂÂand the pawnshopâÂÂwhere he sold his good guitar. Though his song became a hit, Floyd didn't negotiate a contract that would reward him for its success, so he lacks enough money for the guitar, the bus fare to Chicago, and a gravestone for his mother.
Ruby reveals that she came north after her ex-partner ElmoreâÂÂwho she left for his possessive behaviorâÂÂkilled her new partner Leroy in cold blood. She is also pregnant, but doesn't know by which man. Floyd negotiates an advance with his white manager, T.L. Hall, who promises to meet with him the next morning to help him buy back his guitar. When he fails to appear, Floyd learns from Red Carter that Hall has abandoned the city after being found out for a long-term insurance fraud scheme. In despair, Floyd leaves the yard, declaring that he will make it to Chicago. The next day, no one knows where he went, despite Vera, Canewell, and Red Carter's attempts to find him.
Hedley delivers a long monologue about his father, recounting how he once beat Hedley when he asked why his father wasn't a "big man" who fought the system like Toussaint Louverture. After Hedley apologized to his father on his deathbed, he learned that he had already passed. Later, his father came to him in a dream to apologize for dying before forgiving him and promise that Buddy Bolden would bestow Hedley a fortune. Still fearing the sanitarium and that white men would involuntarily commit him to it, Hedley goes to his boss, who gifts him a machete. Later, Hedley is riven with paroxysms of paranoia and despair over the treatment of black men until Ruby, hearing the noise, comes and soothes him, before succumbing to his sexual advances.
Floyd returns after two days, showing Vera a new guitar and telling of his planned performance for Mother's Day at the local club. He also shows her how he bought them both bus tickets to Chicago, expressing his need for her and asking that she accompany him. Vera reveals that she herself had gone to the station earlier to buy her own one-way ticket from Chicago to Pittsburgh, as an expression of her conditional re-commitment to Floyd.
As the women ready for the band's Mother's Day performance, Ruby confides to the others that she plans to have Hedley father her child, as the only man who wanted to provide for, rather than possess, her. She had also accompanied him to church and convinced him to go to the sanitarium the next week. Canewell enters, and reads aloud a newspaper story about the neighbor's son Poochie, who was arrested for robbing the local convenience store. When left alone, Vera tells Canewell of her reconciliation with Floyd, to which he responds with a bittersweet monologue about his own unrequited love for her.
The band's performance is a major success, with the club crowded with patrons. Afterward, Canewell notices an uprooted goldenseal plant in the garden and finds $1,200 buried underneath. Floyd demands it from him and they fight over it briefly, before Floyd pulls his gun. Canewell realizes that this was his score from Poochie's convenience store robbery and relents. A drunk Hedley discovers Floyd with the money and thinks that he's Buddy Bolden. Floyd pushes Hedley to the ground after he tries to take the money. Hedley leaves and returns to slash Floyd's throat with his machete.
The last scene of the play continues the first, with the characters after Floyd's burial. The police had questioned Canewell and Louise on his murder, but didn't know who committed the crime. The play ends with Hedley repeatedly singing Jelly Roll Morton's "I Heard Buddy Bolden Say."
Following its development process in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Seven Guitars opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway on March 28, 1996. The production was directed by Lloyd Richards and featured Keith David (Floyd), Roger Robinson (Hedley), Viola Davis (Vera), Ruben Santiago-Hudson (Canewell), Michele Shay (Louise), Tommy Hollis (Red Carter), and Rosalyn Colemna (Ruby).
The production received largely positive, but qualified, reviews from critics. The New York Times theater critic Vincent Canby praised it as a "big, invigorating if unruly new tragicomedy," that was "still rough around the edges, [but] as funny as it is moving and lyrical." Margo Jefferson argued that Wilson's cycle project had reached the point where "theatergoers should see Seven Guitars, for example, without having to think, 'Can I afford $65 for a play that Vincent and Margo and various other people point out will be disappointing in the second half?'" Linda Winer of Newsday likewise contextualized her review within the broader cycle, writing "in his great cycle of the African-American 20th Century, his men and women have established a tone, a style, a credibility so genuine and alive that their world seems to continue whether we are there or not. We have come to be grateful for the privilege of sharing, even luxuriating, in the special music of their conversations." New York Post critic Clive Barnes wrote that the play was "like a session number with great riffs but a less than interesting melody."
The play received 8 Tony Award nominations, the most of any straight-play that season. Seven Guitars lost the award for Best Play to Terrence McNally's Master Class and won only one award, for Santiago-Hudson's performance as Canewell. The play also received five nominations for the 1996 Drama Desk Awards, winning only for Scott Bradley's set design.