This program is part of WQED's "Pittsburgh History Series."

[ Static crackling ] [ "O Come, All Ye Faithful" plays ] Sebak: It was Christmastime 1989, and our WQED TV crew was driving to New York City.

We knew a secret -- "Pittsburgh Magazine," in its upcoming January issue, was going to name the playwright August Wilson "Pittsburgher of the Year."

And in Local Programming, we always made a half-hour TV documentary about the honoree.

Since August Wilson was in New York City rehearsing for the Broadway premiere of his new play, "The Piano Lesson," we had to go there.

We met Mr. Wilson on December 22.

He already knew about the upcoming honor.

Does this whole "Pittsburgher of the Year" thing strike you as funny or great, or how does it strike you?

I think "ironic," one.

And I'm not quite -- I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

I lived in Pittsburgh 33 years.

I never got very much from the city, you know.

So I left, and I went to Minnesota.

Uh, so I think it's kind of poetic justice, you might say.

Even, and I also find it a bit ironic.

But, uh, it's great.

Me?

"Pittsburgher of the Year"?

Come on!

Sebak: We talked for almost two hours, and pieces of the interview have been used in several programs, including in the documentary called "August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand," produced for the PBS series "American Masters."

♪♪ Now after more than 30 years, we thought it might be worthwhile to share more of that interview.

I want to call this "Brain Space & Energy: My Interview with August Wilson."

♪♪ Is all of this fun for you, I mean...?

It can be, and most times it is.

Uh, it can be... You know, it can be tiring.

You know, it... it... At various points, I mean, you do get burn-out.

And you have to sort of brace up because, for instance, we -- I go through this.

We open a show in January 17th in Los Angeles, and February 26, I start rehearsals for "Two Trains Running," which opens March 27th, and then "Piano Lesson" opens in New York April 16th, and, you know, somehow you have to juggle all that and find brain space and energy, you know, to go through what can be very exhaustive kind of routines or rehearsals.

So I look forward to May, when I can, you know, rest a minute and take a break.

But it's fun in the sense of watching your work come to life and things like that, yeah.

It can be both exciting and fun and tiring and exhaustive.

Sebak: Any that point, in December 1989, Wilson was 44 years old and about halfway through what would become known as his Pittsburgh Cycle of 10 plays.

Of course, the life I know best is Black life in Pittsburgh.

I lived there for -- I was born and lived there for 33 years, and there's a lot of experiences and a lot of things that I conjure up or call up, but all the plays -- with the exception of "Ma Rainey" -- are set in Pittsburgh and based on Pittsburgh, and is about the life in Pittsburgh that I know.

So it's all there.

[ Upbeat big-band music plays ] ♪♪ Sebak: August Wilson was born April 27, 1945, and he was named Frederick August Kittel, after his father, a German baker, who was not around much as the boy grew up.

His mother, Daisy Wilson, raised him, originally in rooms at the back of this house.

Wilson: I grew up in -- on the Hill District.

I lived on Bedford Avenue.

And I guess my earliest memories are of third, fourth grade, coming home from school.

And as I got older, I gradually came to understand that we lived in a mixed neighborhood.

In the neighborhood, there were a lot of Syrians, a lot of Italians, Blacks, and it was... And it was, I think, in every sense of the word, a neighborhood, which I think that it may be all across America, that neighborhoods are no longer what they used to be.

But I remember, like, coming home from school, and all the parents would be sitting out.

And they would have congregated at the local grocery store as opposed to the A&P, and they met there and they stood around in the afternoon and talked about what they were gonna cook for supper.

"Oh, Daisy, what are you cooking today?"

"I'm cooking this," etcetera.

Life in the '50s, I guess, in America was very much different than the life that we know today, so I recall those kinds of things.

However, one was always aware as a -- as a child, become aware of because all the symbols, all the people in authority that you see, and that's everyone from the streetcar conductor to the principal at the school to the person that owns the store to the person in the welfare office, all these people are white.

So you gradually get a sense that all positions of authority -- and I think this is something that, you know, you discover early on -- that this is the situation.

And I think it's something that influences and marks your life as a Black person in America.

Sebak: August's mother, Daisy, who had passed away from lung cancer six years before this interview, was a crucial influence on his early life, and the lives of his three sisters and two brothers.

Wilson: She taught -- She taught us all how to read.

I learned how to read when I was 4 years old.

And I had my library card when I was 5, and in kindergarten, they used to take me up to the third grade and give me their book and let me read to the class at Letshe School, when I started kindergarten there.

But she -- you know, to her, reading was everything because if you can read, you could learn.

Like Marshall McLuhan said, "The book is a computer, and reading is the key that can unlock it."

And so she instilled in all of us, in my brothers and sisters, she taught us all how to read and she would on occasion read to us, and reading was of importance to her.

And language was important.

Although she herself had only had a sixth-grade education.

So yeah, I got that from -- I got the idea of reading and she would take me to the library, and I would get these library books and read and -- you know, so reading and words were, early on in my life, a very important part of it.

♪♪ Sebak: Although the family was not strictly Roman Catholic, Daisy put great value on parochial education and enrolled young "Freddy" in Catholic schools in the Hill District and then in Hazelwood after the family moved there in 1958.

Probably around seventh grade is when I got -- sixth grade actually, there was -- I went to -- at that time, it was St. Richard's School, Catholic school, on Bedford Avenue there.

And I had a teacher, Sister Mary Christopher.

And she was very encouraging.

And she would -- I was writing a book.

She would take these things that... She allowed me to write stories and to read them to the class.

And then she would put them in a book, and I'd go off and write another story and... and so she was very encouraging, and I began to write, and all of the -- you know, the writing assignments that we'd had in elementary school -- and even at Central Catholic -- all of the assignments, somehow I did well at that.

I liked the idea of writing, and I was able to, you know, write, I suspect, interesting, you know, things and construct a sentence, and, you know, I always tried.

I remember, I started writing -- I started writing poetry in seventh grade for Nancy Ireland.

And Nancy Ireland was the girl in the school that even the third-graders were in love with.

So I wrote these poems for her and I would put them on her desk, and I didn't sign my name to them.

You see.

Now I have since -- I suspect, all my life, I've still been writing poems for Nancy Ireland, only her name has changed many times, but I learned to put my name on the poem now.

But I started in poetry, was a...

I think it was -- probably was...

Most people believe, actually, it's easier to write than, say, a short story.

There you've got to have a plot, you got to have something, but a poem, you can, you know...

It's actually, of course, the most difficult art form, the highest written art form, I think, and which is why I still pursue it so passionately, 'cause I want to at least write one good poem.

But I just had a fascination with words and the idea that words can say things and that you can twist them and turn them, and the idea of metaphor and things like this just -- I don't know, just intrigued me.

It was a whole world there to be explored.

[ Gospel music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ I had very -- a very kind of a...

I guess, unique school career.

I started high school at Central Catholic High School in 1959.

And it was not a very nice place to go to school.

My first encounter with both personal and institutional racism.

♪ Where Jesus goes ♪ ♪ I want to go ♪ ♪ I want to go ♪ Sebak: Wilson didn't last long at Central Catholic, took himself out.

He then tried classes at Connelly Trade School -- more trouble there.

And after the family moved to Hazelwood, he went to Gladstone High School, but he soon decided he wasn't being treated fairly there either.

So what I would do is I would get up in the morning, because I didn't want my mother to know that I wasn't going to school.

So I would get up in the morning and I would leave the house as though I were going to school, and I would walk over to Oakland and go to the library.

And I would spend the day in the library and come on back home as though I were going to school.

I did this maybe for three or four months, and because I actually didn't have to get up in the morning, I started sleeping in later and later, and finally, one day, I told my mother that I had quit school, that I, you know, didn't choose to go anymore.

And she told me, "Go find a job."

That was her response to that, but that is... what happened in regard to my academic career.

[ Patti Page's "Long Long Ago" plays ] ♪♪ ♪ Tell me the tales that to me were so dear ♪ ♪ Long, long ago ♪ ♪ Long, long ago ♪ 1965.

I lived across -- I lived on St. Vincent De Paul.

I'm sorry, I lived on Fifth Avenue at...

I'm trying to remember the address now.

It was right across the street from the St. Vincent De Paul store, and Monsignor Bassompierre ran the St. Vincent De Paul store.

I used to serve Mass for him when I was a kid.

Anyway, they -- I didn't -- I didn't have -- I didn't have a record player, and I didn't have music.

I didn't have the wherewithal to get that, but at St. Vincent De Paul, one day, I discovered a record player.

It played 78 records that I bought for $3.

And they had stacks of records that were a nickel apiece.

And I would go whenever I had extra 50 cents, go over there and pick 10 records, and I was very indiscriminate about which ones I picked.

As long as it was a record and it had some music on it, that's all I wanted.

And I would take them home and I'd listen to them, you know, "I don't like this one, I like this one, I don't like this one."

And what they were were mostly records -- it was a virtual history of popular music of the '30s and '40s, all the big-band sounds, and, you know, anyone -- Patti Page -- and everything was in there.

And one day, in my stack of records, there was a yellow-label record that had a typewritten label.

And it was by someone named Bessie Smith.

And it was odd because of this typewritten label.

And I put it on my thing, and the song was "Nobody In Town Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine."

And I listened to it, and it was so unlike anything that I had ever heard in all of these other records that it was literally -- I was stunned by it.

I didn't know that this thing existed, this kind of music, and to hear her voice.

♪ In a bakery shop today ♪ ♪ I heard Miss Mandy Jenkins say ♪ ♪ She had the best cake, you see ♪ It suddenly -- it had something to do with me.

This was someone who was talking to me, whereas Patti Page wasn't talking to me.

Patti Page was singing a song.

And I listened to the song, and I listened to it again.

And I listened to it.

And I listened to it like 22 straight times.

I just listened to this over and over.

♪ Nobody in town can bake a ♪ ♪ Sweet jelly roll like mine ♪ ♪ Like mine ♪ And then I turned it on the other side, and there was a song called "If You Don't I Know Who Will."

Was the other side.

Now, as I've since discovered, neither of these is Bessie's best records, but that was my introduction.

And I immediately got up the next day and ran over to St. Vincent De Paul, and I'm looking through the stacks for another Bessie Smith.

I mean, I spent four or five hours there that day looking at all those records, and I could not find a Bessie Smith.

But I began to search out, began to get discriminate.

I was looking for something that said "blues" as opposed to "fox trot," you know.

And as I... A lot of them said "fox trot" whether they're or weren't, and occasionally I stumbled across some other records by primarily women, blues.

Lil Green -- "Romance In The Dark" is another one I recall that I had on 78.

And then I began to discriminate and began to research and search out this music that I discovered.

And it was really my beginning discovery of -- not only of blues but of a music that spoke to me, and this led me to -- in concert with some other things, this led me to alter the way that I looked at the world and the way that I looked at the people around me and the way I looked at my grandmother in her life, because Bessie represented her in that sense.

And so I began to discover in my grandmother's life a richness and a fullness that I had not known had existed before.

I think the blues are the cultural response of Black America to the situation that they found themselves in.

I think that if you look at the blues, there's an entire philosophy at work in the blues.

The ideas and attitudes of the people, their values, the things they sanction.

I found all in blues music.

For instance, if you did not know anything -- I mean, if someone gave you a record and you knew nothing whatsoever about the people who made that music, the music would inform you of their grace, their passion, their -- their social conduct, their social organization.

It would imbue you, in fact, of their culture.

I think it's an encapsulation of Black America's cultural ideas, which were preserved in the blues, being -- being that we come out of a oral history in which information is passed along orally.

The music then provides you with an emotional reference for the information, so it serves a dual focus.

And the idea of, course, with oral information -- it has to be repeated.

And what better way to have information repeated than to sing it?

And someone would sing the song, and that is what kept alive the information.

So I think -- I think in all of the art, including jazz and written art -- all of the art that Black America has created can be traced back to the blues impulse, or the cultural -- initial cultural impulse of Black Americans, which is the blues.

♪ 'Cause if you don't ♪ ♪ And say you won't ♪ ♪ I know who will ♪ ♪ My other papa ♪ ♪ I know who will ♪ Well, I think, for instance -- I think Pittsburgh is -- I mean, what's happening in Pittsburgh in terms of with the Black community is happening in Cleveland, Newark, Detroit, Harlem, it's happening all over.

It's the same thing.

There are some specifics, of course, in Pittsburgh, but I think in writing about the Black experience, the experience in Pittsburgh of Blacks in Pittsburgh, I think it's, for the most part, typical of the whole experience of Blacks.

So since that's what I know, I continue to set the plays there.

But I think it encompasses all the cities.

I mean, they very well could be set in Cleveland because the -- the things that happen in the plays are things that happen in Black American life, wherever it's at.

Sebak: But some locations in Pittsburgh made an impact on the young man in the Hill District.

Wilson: Pat's Place on Wiley Avenue.

There's a couple things with Pat's Place.

One, I read Claude McKay's "Home To Harlem," in which he mentioned Pat's Place.

And the railroad porters in the '20s and '30s used to hang out at Pat's Place.

I said, "Oh, I know where that's at."

Of course, it had moved from where it used to be, down around -- on Fullerton and Wiley.

And it moved up to -- further up Wiley, I guess the 1,800 block of Wiley.

And when I was about 22, 23, in Pittsburgh at that time, when every day had to be continually negotiated, I found it very difficult, and I didn't -- I wasn't sure I was gonna make it to 24.

And I wasn't... And I saw an elderly man walking the street, 65 years old, and I wondered how it was that he had managed to live that long.

And I wanted to, like, find out how do you do that, so I followed him into Pat's Place, and these guys would sit around in there, and -- stand around, actually, and talk.

They would talk everything -- history, philosophy, the news of the day, papers, this, that, and the other.

And a lot of things, I'd just sit around listening because I wanted to learn something.

And I found out some of this stuff I was able to use later on in my plays.

For instance, I recall walking in there one day, and one guy's standing around, and he just happens to say, that -- he says, "Yeah, I come up Pittsburgh.

I come to Pittsburgh in '39, see, I come up on the B&O Railroad."

Another guy says, "No, you ain't.

You ain't come up on the B&O.

I don't know what railroad you come up on, but you didn't come up on the B&O Railroad, 'cause the B&O Railroad didn't stop in Pittsburgh in '39."

And he says, "You gonna tell me what -- what train I caught?"

He says, "Hell yeah, I'm gonna tell you the truth.

You tell me you come on the B&O, you didn't stop in thir"...

So everybody that came in the place, "Hey, hey, Fillmore.

Hey, Fillmore, he say he come up on... Tell the man the train ain't stopped in -- the B&O ain't stopped in Pittsburgh in '39."

And on and on.

That went on for like a week.

About what train this guy rode on this particular railroad.

And I was able to use that in, you know, something very similar in "Ma Rainey."

So it's those kinds of things, but more importantly, I think it's the ideas and attitudes of the community, looking on them as the elders of the community, and the things that they sanctioned, the conducts that they sanctioned, and the ideas and attitudes which had been passed along to them as young men.

Those were the things that I honed in on as I sought to discover what it is that the community demanded of me and what it is -- how best I could -- what was expected of me as a man and how best I could live my life.

♪♪ I first got into theater in 1968 with the Black Horizons Theater that I started with my friend Rob Penny on the Hill District with the idea of politicizing the community.

This was in the middle of the Black Power movement.

I felt it both a duty and an honor to participate in altering the relationship of Blacks to the society in which we live in.

But I couldn't write plays, though.

I tried to write plays, and I couldn't write dialogue.

And even in my short fiction, there was very little dialogue in the fiction.

And when I moved to St. Paul, two things -- three things happened.

One, I got a job at the Science Museum in Minnesota, writing scripts for a theater troupe that was attached there, and we were doing, like, "Tales of the" -- adapting "Tales of the Northwest Indians."

The second thing is, I began for the first time to listen or to hear the voices of the people that I had grown up with all my life, you see, which, I think, most importantly, I didn't value.

I didn't value the way that Blacks spoke.

I thought, in order to make it into literature, that you had to change it.

And which is why I couldn't write dialogue, but once I... My friend Rob Penny told me that...

I asked him once, I said, "How do you make 'em talk?"

He said, "You don't.

You listen to them."

And once I began to listen to them and value and respect the way that they talked, then it was easy to write dialogue.

It became my strongest suit.

And not only was it easy to write dialogue but I found out that the characters had things that they wanted to say, and so... My other friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul was a director, and his friend was a playwright -- I mean, was a writer who wasn't writing plays, so that wasn't gonna last long, and he kept encouraging me to write a play, so finally, in 1979, I sat down and I wrote a play called "Jitney," which was my first realistic play.

I had written a few one-acts before that, but that's when I seriously began to divert most of my energies into playwriting.

♪♪ I wrote "Jitney," which I set in 1971, and I wrote a play called "Fullerton Street," which I set in 1941, and then I wrote a play called "Ma Rainey," which I set in -- "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," which I set in 1927.

And it was right about there I said, "Oh, I got three plays, three different decades.

Why don't I just continue to do that?"

And so I didn't set out with any grand scheme in mind.

It was just something I more or less stumbled on, because I wrote my first three plays in different decades.

And then I just decided to continue to do that.

Which has been helpful because it's provided me with a framework.

I -- you know, I just finished a '60s play.

I got the '40s and '80s to go.

So then I'll make decision on which one to write next, you know, so I'll have something to write.

♪♪ I write in bars and restaurants, and I can write anywhere at anytime.

I don't need to be secluded off anywhere.

That's some people's requirements.

I'm not knocking that.

I'm just not that kind of person, so I can always have a pencil and a piece of paper and I can write snatches of dialogue or write a scene.

I can sit down and write a scene, and etcetera.

So I can write wherever I'm at, so... And I demand myself that I continue to work.

♪♪ All of the characters on the stage are, in essence, myself.

They are all made up out of myself, and writing is like walking, you know, down this landscape of the self, and you have to be willing to confront whatever it is that you've discovered and to deal with it.

And this can sometimes be a very difficult thing to do, and it is like wrestling with your demons, until hopefully you emerge at the end with -- with a larger truth, and you emerge to find that your spirit has gotten larger and that your demons, in fact, are not as large as they seemed to be before.

That in the process of wrestling with them, that you have strengthened yourself.

And I think that's what writing is for me.

It comes out of the self, and you're forced to confront what is there, what you discover, if you're going to be honest.

Sebak: Wilson's honesty and his belief in the importance of theater made him one of the most important playwrights in American history.

The year after this interview, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for "The Piano Lesson," the play then in rehearsals.

He would go on to complete 10 major plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century, often referred to as the Century Cycle or the Pittsburgh Cycle.

He died of liver cancer in Seattle in October 2005 at the age of 60.

He was buried in Pittsburgh.

His work may live forever.

Wilson: You know, I've been writing 24 years, and you take your own measure of your own talent, and I've always thought I was a pretty decent writer, you know.

And some things, you know, didn't have to turn out this way, but it worked out fine.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪