Overview

Singing was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as ""actresses"" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.

Full Product Details

9780822357315

Table of Contents

Reviews

Staging the Blues is a much-needed, even game-changing intervention into dominant models for the study of blues music and culture. Based on amazing original research, Paige A. McGinley reassesses what we think we know about the blues, offers bold and insightful analyses of the racial and gendered politics of blues performance and reception, and, crucially, restores critical recognition of the theatricality of the blues and its historical place in traditions of popular performance. --the Modern (03/12/2014)

Staging the Blues is a much-needed, even game-changing intervention into dominant models for the study of blues music and culture. Based on amazing original research, Paige A. McGinley reassesses what we think we know about the blues, offers bold and insightful analyses of the racial and gendered politics of blues performance and reception, and, crucially, restores critical recognition of the theatricality of the blues and its historical place in traditions of popular performance. --Jayna Brown, author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (03/12/2014)

This beautifully written and engaging account of how blues has been staged will change for good how theater scholars think of musical performance, and how music scholars think of theater. Paige A. McGinley's observation that 'authenticity is produced theatrically, on stage, in the context of the performance event' deconstructs the binary between authenticity and inauthenticity, allowing her to focus on black agency and subjectivity as it is produced in and through performance. Staging the Blues is a much-needed, even game-changing intervention into dominant models for the study of blues music and culture. Based on amazing original research, Paige A. McGinley reassesses what we think we know about the blues, offers bold and insightful analyses of the racial and gendered politics of blues performance and reception, and, crucially, restores critical recognition of the theatricality of the blues and its historical place in traditions of popular performance.

Author Information

Paige A. McGinley is Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

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