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

In Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism, Paige A. McGinley takes an inventive approach to studying the blues. Weaving her analysis from the varied threads of blues history, theatre history, and performance studies, McGinley argues convincingly that attention to live performance has been understudied in existing blues scholarship. Her aim, as she explains in the Introduction, is to “trace a linked but discontinuous genealogy of theatrical blues performance” (3) in which tent shows, touring shows, and the early touring performers, many of them women, played pivotal roles, despite their near-erasure in the many blues histories that valorize wandering male musicians in the rural Delta. She highlights the way that all performance, whether on a proscenium stage with lights and glitter or on a seemingly innocent front porch, is always already “theatrical,” featuring a mise-en-scène, costumes, props, and interaction between performers and audience. She notes that blues emerged along with (and partly from) various other forms of Southern black popular entertainment, such as tent shows, vaudeville theatres, and minstrel shows, and laments that the role of popular theater has been “marginalized in blues scholarship.” While she insists that she is not trying to create a new master narrative for blues history, she does intend to “shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practices as central, rather than secondary” (7).

A second, complementary goal of Staging the Blues is to deconstruct the notion of “authenticity,” which has gone a long way to privileging those male, rural blues singers working in a folk tradition and underrating the historical significance of classic female blues artists. In McGinley’s persuasive argument, the notion of “authenticity” valorized by folklorists like John and Alan Lomax is itself a staged construction: overalls are as much a costume as a feather boa when worn by an entertainer. In fact, noting the persistent first-person speaker—the witnessing “I” of most blues lyrics—McGinley sees even the most apparently untutored blues artist as a ventriloquist (22), since he or she is already performing a character whose experiences and attitudes do not necessarily match those of the artist. Her emphasis on “theatricality’s and authenticity’s intertwined and interdependent stage histories” (9) helps her establish blues “authenticity” as a construct. This recurrent theme, reiterated in various ways in each chapter, is perhaps the most significant contribution of the book.

After the provocative Introduction, Staging the Blues comprises four chapters, each one focused on a pivotal moment in the history of live blues performance. Chapter one, “Real Personality: The Blues Actress,” centers on the careers of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both of whom had long histories of performing in traveling road shows as well as in the theaters on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. For McGinley, these touring performance shows worked as travelogues, with the performers relating to their often migratory audiences through the idiom of travel and representing the enormous cultural shifts in African American experience during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their glamour also offered black audiences a new possibility for black womanhood that depended neither on plantation stereotypes nor on the strictures of the racial uplift movement. A highlight of this chapter is McGinley’s nuanced exploration of various publicity photographs of Rainey and Smith, where she notes that the photos, like the stars’ musical performances, suggest a consciously “theatrical self-fashioning”: the photographs are another site of performance (56–57).

Chapter two, “Theatre Folk: Huddie Ledbetter on Stage,” is especially compelling, as it divides Ledbetter’s career into three stages: the first forty-five years; the six months he spent touring with John Lomax; and his late international touring career. Seeing Ledbetter as “the hinge” between the theatrical traditions of Southern touring shows and the postwar emphasis on the folk blues tradition, McGinley effectively demonstrates that white folklorists created musicians in a theatrical image just as powerfully as the minstrel and...