“Ma Rainey” primarily takes place around a musical event, which can be read as inside a concert hall or outdoors on a makeshift stage. The titular character has grown popular enough by this time to warrant a more professional environment, but her audience is primarily people of lower social standing in the rural American south. This is important because of the difficult lives of these people at this time period, an era of racial segregation and injustice towards people of color. Ma Rainey gives them a way to both acknowledge and escape those troubles for an evening.