In Staging the Blues, Paige McGinley shows us what performance studies can do: look for signs of the social in the theatricality with which blues performers constructed both their shows and their personae. The story she tells of the blues in performance and as social history is meticulously researched, her analysis richly textured, and her narrative compelling from start to finish. She pulls together a remarkable array of sources to create vivid impressions of performances by Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and many others both famous and not so. Although McGinley says early on that Staging the Blues “is more concerned with routes than roots” (26), in fact it is the very notion of “roots”—including the legacy of minstrelsy—that she is at pains to deconstruct for us, as she attacks the way ideas of authenticity and uplift contributed to the codification of blues performance even as we see it today.
The ground McGinley covers should be familiar to fans of the music and its stars: the rise of the blues in the South, its migration to the North, its transatlantic journey and appropriation by British rockers, and finally its return to the South as nostalgia. But by looking directly at the theatricality of blues performances, McGinley demonstrates how the story's construction has been conventionalized, colored by environments onstage and off into which these performances were cast. She does this by calling our attention to the way blues singers acted onstage, creating personae and exhibiting virtuosity; in so doing, she recuperates the agency of the performers as artists who consciously and actively negotiated the expectations of their audiences. In describing the performances—the set and costume designs, the way the singers acted onstage, their relationship to the audience and their social environments—and highlighting the theatrical interplay of race and gender, she pulls the performativity of the blues into a new focus.
Staging the Blues focuses on paradigmatic performances at what McGinley identifies as “transformational crossroads, a moment when blues underwent a major shift or reorientation in terms of performance, reception, circulation, or dissemination” (26). At the heart of the first chapter are the “blues actress[es]” (25), particularly Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, whose highly theatrical performances produced vibrant and productive negotiations with the social context of the 1910s and 1920s. McGinley also tackles the antitheatrical prejudice underscoring the progressive idealization of male blues performers as more authentic at the expense of the women whose glamorous costumes and innovative acts had served to popularize the blues in the first place.
Chapter 2 centers on the legendary blues singer Lead Belly. Here McGinley does an exceptional job of working through the complexities of his performative relationship with John and Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologists who both championed and constrained his appearances (onstage and off) in the 1930s. We see the emergence of a male-dominated blues culture, preserved via new technologies and promulgated in large part by the white men who took credit for discovering, and pitched what they determined to be, authentic blues performances to audiences in the North. In particular, McGinley considers the place of the prison, alongside the porch and the train platform, as lived experience and as metaphor in the blues imaginary.
Chapter 3 sees the blues cross the Atlantic, focusing in particular on the performance and reception of The Blues and Gospel Train in Manchester. Staged on a train platform, audiences saw “a scene of blues travel [that] superimposed two coincident ‘troubles’ of 1964: U.S. civil rights violence and Mancunian economic decline” (169). McGinley deepens our understanding of the way the music itself was translated and made meaningful by 1960s rockers, and how it was then played back to white (and black) America, particularly on college campuses. For my part, I vividly recall seeing Elizabeth Cotten in the Reed College Student Union in 1974, and John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. McGinley's careful contextualization breathes new life into my memories of the fervor—reverence really—that enveloped the audience, and then troubles my reflection on these performances by questioning “whether the performances of The Blues and Gospel Train contributed to a greater recognition of black equality, or whether the program's minstrel-show setting further naturalized racialist conceptions of black authenticity” (169).
Finally, McGinley returns to the South to look at the staging of blues for tourists. Such performances can seem to freeze what was an actively theatrical engagement with the social into a consumable, nonflammable form. Central to this chapter is a fascinating analysis of the Shack Up Inn: an assemblage of sharecropper cabins, collected from across the Mississippi Delta, placed next to each other in ways that evoke “the architectural arrangement of slave quarters in the nineteenth century,” filled with “kitsch, castoffs, and garbage, thus producing a history of and as detritus,” and as such done up as accommodation for (predominantly white) tourists eager for an experience of surrogation (207). In effect, McGinley says: “Using embodied heritage, the Shack Up Inn casts the tourist as a person without (slave) property and offers absolution from histories and economies of property and pleasure” (209). In the end, McGinley has her own ideas of authenticity. For her, the decaying remains of the Savoy Theater in Clarksdale, Mississippi, bear witness to its former occupants, the performers and their audiences who “gathered for decades for blues, drinking, dancing, and comedy” (220). It is an elegiac closing for a book that is deeply engaged in showing us the vitality of the blues in performance.
