Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley
Critics and scholars have begun to focus on the visual, gestural, and performative elements that comprise an indelible component of African American popular music such as traditional blues, jazz, and hip hop. This trend toward the non-sonic components of musical performance provides the opportunity to discuss how these artists crafted their stage identities, and in turn affected the reception and dissemination of their public personae and musical performances. Paige A. McGinley’s Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism is one such example. Placing elements of the theater at the fore of her analysis, McGinley shifts the study of the blues away from that of a singular sonic medium and toward that of a diverse and cross-disciplinary performance practice. Spread over four chapters and segmented into short digestible sections, Staging the Blues is not a retelling of the history of the blues through a performance or theater studies framework, but rather an examination of key performers and moments that complicate and challenge commonly accepted narratives of blues performance. This text explores the ways in which staging and theatricality have shaped the performance and reception of blues performers from the early-twentieth century to the present day.
Wrestling with accounts that reinforce divides along gender, geography, and genres, McGinley looks to overcome the surfeit of histories and accounts that “marginalize or sidestep histories of theatrical practice” (3). Opening with a survey of blues performance and historiography, the author asks succinctly “what happens when we subject the mise-en-scene of blues performance to critical analysis” (4). Using language and the terms of the theater to guide her narrative, McGinley deftly touches upon how issues of racial authenticity, working-class and vaudevillian entertainments, African American social uplift ideology, folklore, sound recordings, gender, and mobility have singularly or in combination shaped histories of the blues. Each one of these approaches to accounts of blues performance carries its own particular agenda for effacing theatrical and performative elements of blues performance. Returning the theatrical aspect of blues performance to center stage allows for a more rich and nuanced account of blues performers and performances.
In chapter 1, “Real Personality,” McGinley details how early female blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith used trappings of the theater and theatricality in their [End Page 712] performances. Often seen as a footnote, the theatricality of Smith’s and Rainey’s performances are treated as a crucial component. As McGinley notes, omitting these aspects is problematic: “theatrical blues singing developed during a period when popular music and popular theater were deeply intertwined” (35). Generic divides did not exist for performers or for their audiences. McGinley highlights how Smith and Rainey incorporated theatrical trappings such as stage props, costuming, and technology into their public personae and performances to evade and resist dominant social and aesthetic codes of the era. Most intriguing about this chapter was calling attention to these artists’ deployment of recording technology and photography to enhance their performance careers.
The second chapter examines male blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s performance career during the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than adhering to conventional approaches surrounding Ledbetter, McGinley positions the theatrical elements of his performances on the forestage. The rise of folklore studies and the quest for the authentic and the real lead to an erasure, or in McGinley’s words, “abjection” of the theatrical elements of blues performance (83). Countering traditional accounts of Ledbetter as solely a blues musician, McGinley highlights how Ledbetter’s performance career was “deeply indebted to theatrical traditions” such as dance, comedy, and spoken monologues. It is quite clear after reading this section that one must view Ledbetter not just as a musician, but also as a consummate professional who was well versed in multiple modes of popular entertainment. The middle-section of the chapter explores Zora Neale Hurston’s and Alan Lomax’s approach to the role and place of the theater and theatricality in folklore studies. In spite of Lomax’s abjuration of...
