Joe Turner's Come and Gone

August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone, was inspired both by the 1978 Romare Bearden artwork, Mill Hand's Lunch Bucket, and the blues song, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." The song, which was recorded by legendary blues artist, W. C. Handy, was first sung by many estranged black women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and sons to Joe Turner—a plantation owner who illegally enslaved blacks in the early twentieth century. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans' search for their cultural identity, following the repression of American slavery.