Joe Turner's Come and Gone marked the first occasion of August Wilson's landmark collaborative history at the Huntington. Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans’ search for their cultural identity following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald’s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors and moved on to self-sufficiency