The great bluesman B. B. King passed away on 14 May 2015. Immediately, the Internet and other media filled with tributes to the performer that traced his rise to global prominence from his origins as the son of sharecroppers on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. The recourse to biography serves in these obituaries to authenticate King's relationship with the blues tradition and, in turn, to authenticate the blues tradition as such. The question of authenticity haunts the history of the blues more than any other genre of music. Record executives, folklorists, historians and fans have all dug deep into the Delta imaginary looking for the purest expression of country blues music untainted by commercialism or urban modernization. Paige McGinley turns this narrative on its head, exploring instead the theatricality, rather than the authenticity, of the blues. While other scholars have critiqued what McGinley calls the ‘relentless pursuit of origins’ in blues historiography, McGinley offers a powerful anatomization of this authenticity-effect by tracing the close relationship between the blues and the milieu of popular theatre (p. 17).

Recovering the trappings of popular theatre in significant blues performances across the twentieth century – the classic blues of the early twentieth century, the folkloric production of Lead Belly in the 1940s, the transatlantic blues revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the blues tourism industry of the 1990s and 2000s – McGinley considers the elements of blues performance typically left unseen by a myopic musicology and blues historiography that privilege the sonic. Reading the blues as a form of theatre (including choreographed gestures, carefully chosen costumes, and set designs that shaped live blues performance) produces a number of fresh insights. McGinley shows, for example, that even while the New Negro in Harlem often frowned upon the migrant, working-class expression of blues women, singers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith presented ‘a new model of Southern womanhood’ that contested the stage types of figures such as Topsy and Mammy (p. 27). Through their elaborate sartorial self-fashioning, Rainey and Smith complicate the distinction between respectability politics and the life world of the blues singer; the blues woman was, McGinley suggests, a race woman, though not in the mode that many have come to expect. Similarly, her analysis of England's 1964 television broadcast of The Blues and Gospel Train live performance offers beautiful close readings of specific performances by Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and shows more generally how a blues theatricality translated plantation nostalgia for the largely white European market that developed for the blues in the 1950s and 1960s.

Tracing the iterative qualities of theatrical blues trappings and their transformation by blues performers, Staging the Blues makes an important contribution to our understanding of the production and performance of race. Its exhaustive archival depth recasts familiar performances and introduces new material that adds to the scholarly repertoire of black performance studies. Most significantly, it establishes a vital conversation between popular theatre and music that provides a model of interdisciplinary performance studies.