Staging The Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley (review)

Surely there is no more authentic icon of the blues than Robert Johnson, who, legends say, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for virtuosity. Johnson’s fame is, of course, due to his musical genius, but is bolstered by his invisibility. He is a peculiarly inevident icon, leaving behind only three photographs and a lean discography of forty-two tracks. Paige McGinley shows that such invisibility is fundamental to the blues cult of authenticity, but it is an invisibility constructed both with and against the theatre. The devil’s bargain was struck not by musicians, but rather by marketers, curators, and historians discomfited by dance, furs, rhinestones, and silk. And the devil’s due was not the soul, but the theatre—and with the theatre, the facts of the matter. As McGinley makes abundantly evident, “the architectures, devices, and practices—the trappings—of the popular theatre” are “central, rather than secondary” to blues performance and blues history (3, 7).

Playing on the crossroads trope, McGinley locates each of her book’s chapters at a “transformational crossroads” that altered the “performance, reception, circulation, or dissemination” of the form (26). Gertrude “Ma” Rainey appears at the first, emerging in all her fabulousness from a giant Victrola, decked in a trademark silk-and-sequin extravagance, belting “Moonshine Blues.” Such extravagance was not uniquely Rainey’s, but integral to the variety roadshows sponsored by the Theatre Owners Booking Association road circuit, which commercialized and disseminated the blues across the United States. By restoring these shows to the story McGinley not only recovers the exuberant theatricality of early blues, but also its intimate relationship to vaudeville, minstrelsy, and orientalism—and the anxiety that these inspired in “respectable” African Americans. Most importantly, she proves that Rainey and Bessie Smith were inventors rather than innovative latecomers (54).

Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter is the singer we find at the second crossroads. Although she admits that his story has been well-trod, McGinley avers that there is a “theatrical energy and repertoire … present in Ledbetter’s performances, albeit in a … submerged way” (82). To that end, she revises his story to foreground the contributions of John and Alan Lomax, the pioneering archivists and promoters of the form. Rather than treating the Lomaxes simply as archivists and promoters, she portrays them as “performers in their own right, whose theatrical thinking shaped their stagings of Lead Belly,” although in “unacknowledged and often unobserved ways” (83). Indeed, because none of these three men “identified as theater artists” they were able to disguise, by way of a repertoire and rhetoric of authenticity, the fact that Lead Belly’s performances were always staged.

Although it is well-known that British rockers like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton drew global attention to the brilliance of artists like Ledbetter, few know the seminal role of a 1964 BBC television program in sparking the blues revival. The third chapter reconstructs The Blues and Gospel Train, watched by over 12 million and featuring performances by Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Cousin Joe, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Through a detailed analysis of staging, performance, and audience response captured in the video, McGinley demonstrates how nostalgia for a black pastoral and postwar anxieties about class and uneven development became embedded in both the performance and historiography of the blues.

The final crossroads to which McGinley takes her reader are the multiple, heavily commercialized, occasionally bizarre heritage tourism sites scattered across the Mississippi Delta. These “holy sites” attract pilgrims from around the world to “both consume and produce a genealogy of blues performance” (178). They offer some mixed pleasures indeed, including the opportunity to sleep in “authentic” shotgun shacks, although these are outfitted with indoor toilets, heat, electricity, and hot and cold water. The blues heritage industry produces “an uncomfortable [at least to scholars like McGinley] slippage between the leisure tourism of a mostly white, male, older, wealthy group and historical migrations of the...