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

Paige A. McGinley is a TDR Books section co-editor. She was not involved in the commissioning or editing of this review.

— Ed.

Aesthetes have long imagined that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Paige McGinley, who is leading a wave of performance scholarship that might be characterized as music studies without the musicologists, sees this old question in a new light. For her, the blues aspires to the condition of theatre. Her ambitious aim is “to shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practice as central, rather than secondary” (7). In four deeply researched and compellingly written chapters, she makes a powerful case that theatricality was indeed central not only to the birth of the blues, but also to its fundamental meaning as a performance practice.

Staging the Blues begins at the turn of the 20th century with tent-show variety acts in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and other crossroad sites in the Delta region. It ends at the turn of the 21st century with international blues tourism, also in Clarksdale. In between, exploring venues as geographically diverse as the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the retrofitted Wilbraham Road railway station in Manchester (UK), McGinley renovates some widely held presumptions about the blues as an American “folk” art. Sophisticated professional show people put on all the performances she treats. Her argument unfolds step by step through her patient dismantling of an anti-theatrical master narrative of blues’ direct-from-the-cotton-patch authenticity.

The influential story told by the pioneering ethnomusicologists and folklorists John and Alan Lomax locates the origins of the blues in amateur venues, from the front porches of one-room shacks to penitentiary cellblocks, where bluesmen in overalls or prison stripes wailed their unremunerated sorrows to the disregarding moon. Bluesmen get the emphasis in such traditional accounts, epitomized by the story of John Lomax’s key informant, Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly” (1888–1949). A charismatic vocalist and musical virtuoso on 12-string guitar, piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and diatonic accordion, Ledbetter also did hard time in Southern prison farms — Texas’s Imperial State Prison (“Sugar Land”) and the Louisiana State Penitentiary (“Angola”), both located on former plantations. The folklorists foregrounded the idea that the prison-farm inmates, like enslaved field hands before them, sang while they worked. They tended to deemphasize the fact that Ledbetter, after his release from Angola, was hard at work for them while he entertained the largely white audiences they assembled in his name. Lead Belly recorded and toured under the management of John Lomax, who validated each number ethnographically as “a specimen of Negro music,” performed by “a real Negro” ( John Lomax, letter to Oliver Strunk, 1934; in McGinley 106–7). McGinley savors the rich contradictions of such disavowed stagecraft. In a misguided effort at costume authenticity, for example, Lomax wanted Ledbetter to perform wearing his prison uniform, but the singer resisted (111). A lively dancer, Ledbetter wanted to keep soft-shoe choreography as part of his routine, but the ethnomusicologist resisted. Alert to the degree of artifice required to achieve authenticity on Lomax’s terms, McGinley sums up his curatorial attitude as “antitheatrical theatricalism” (103).

Challenging the folkloric master narrative, Staging the Blues opens with two counterclaims. The first is that the earliest performers professionally staged the blues as part of variety-act mixed bills. Operating somewhere along a continuum between minstrelsy and vaudeville, these tent-circuit shows featured not only singing, but also dancing, role-playing in fancy dress, and ribald byplay with the audience. The second counterclaim is that the originators of this genre of blues performance were women. Preceding her account of Ledbetter with an opening chapter that foregrounds the stage careers of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) and Bessie Smith (1894–1937), McGinley claims the blues for an enlarged history of performance in which...