Kimberly Mack's first full-length monograph, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is a breakthrough in blues scholarship. Mack argues that autobiographical self-invention is an important but rarely examined tradition in blues performance, recording, writing, and literature. This tradition of blues storytelling counters “racially essentialist notions of blues authenticity” and “recasts the blues as a narrative tradition cutting across traditional boundaries of race” (2). By analyzing historical and contemporary blues performers and fictional literary figures, Mack shows that musicians and authors use embellished or falsified autobiographical details to take control of, invent, and re-invent their blues personas. In doing so, blues musicians and figures can “resist racial, social, economic, and gendered oppression while writing themselves into the tradition” (5).
Mack situates herself within the milieu of progressive blues, folk, and music revival scholarship from the last two decades, referencing and adding to work by Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton, and Grace Hale.Footnote 1 Literary analysis and criticism are her dominant methodologies, and she cites literary and cultural theorists Mieke Bal, William Nelles, and Gérard Genette as foundational to her understanding of autobiographical narrative.Footnote 2 Mack applies her analysis to original song lyrics, lyrical revisions of traditional blues and folk songs, interviews with and about musicians and authors, stage banter, gossip, and reception history.
Mack's thesis, that autobiographical storytelling is a major tradition in blues, challenges the reader to rethink what blues is, and shifts the popular characterization of blues from a “racially naturalized skill to a storytelling art form” (4). Instead of drawing rigid racialized, gendered, or cultural boundaries around blues authenticity, the author offers nuanced analyses about the different ways performers use autobiographical self-invention for their varied personal goals. However, as Mack shows throughout her work, just because any musician can write themselves into the blues tradition through autobiographical storytelling does not absolve practitioners of cultural appropriation or exploitation.
In the first chapter, Mack profiles the “architects of the blues,” who she defines as “Black men and women who used fictionalized autobiographical blues expression to take control of their own narratives,” showing how their fictionalizations “reclaim their subjectivity in the face of racism, patriarchy, and poverty” (14). For instance, singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey subverted gender norms by embracing rumors of their sexual prowess. Composer W.C. Handy, who crowned himself the Father of the Blues, published some of the earliest blues compositions after claiming to have “discovered” the genre from uncredited Black musicians playing at a train station in rural Mississippi. However, just as Handy foregrounded his proximity to the impoverished rural creators of the genre, he delineated a clear boundary between them and himself as the translator, refiner, and producer of blues for popular (read: white and cosmopolitan Black) audiences.
Mack asserts that white blues writers in the 1940s and beyond took as fact the embellishments blues musicians inserted into their songs and stories, but that this was not the intention of the genre's architects. This disconnect created a body of blues revivalist literature in which white blues revivalists turned myths and embellishments into historical facts. Combined with racial stereotyping, these misunderstandings and misconceptions about blues permeated the dominant narrative and the tropes understood to be associated with the genre, and Mack builds on these concepts in each subsequent chapter.
In the second chapter, she turns to blues musician Big Mama Thornton, contemporary blues-influenced pop star Amy Winehouse, and fictional blueswomen characters created by Alice Walker to show the ways in which women have defied gendered limitations through autobiographical self-invention.Footnote 3 The author discusses how blues revivalist writers have created reductive notions of blues authenticity that have relegated blueswomen to a specific set of attributes embodied by early women blues stars like Bessie Smith. Thornton, however, defied the expectations foisted upon her by dressing in men's clothing, disclosing little information about her love life, and playing harmonica (which was not a women's instrument). Mack further shows that Thornton, the original singer of the Elvis Presley hit “Hound Dog,” advocated for her often-forgotten position in blues history by repeating her songwriting prowess and historical importance while onstage and in interviews. In regard to Amy Winehouse, Mack points out that her lyrics and vocal style placed her within the blues tradition, but that she also adopted a “Black, male persona in some of her work” (104). Although Winehouse, who was white, had a vocal style and sound that clearly appropriated Black music, Mack notes that “the concept of blues authenticity is rooted in narrative fictionality to begin with, so Winehouse [was] merely contributing to that tradition” when she adopted the persona of a Black man (104). Her lyrical gender-bending thus diverted attention away from the overwhelming media focus on her physical appearance and chaotic personal life.
Robert Johnson—the epitome of the rural, rambling, romantic bluesman trope—is the focus of Chapter 3. Mack recounts how the Johnson mythology centers on him selling his soul to the devil in exchange for musical prowess, a deal that allows him to perform and record commercially, but leads to his untimely and mysterious death. Because very few biographical details of Johnson's life can be confirmed, white blues revivalist writers and musicians who “discovered” and (re)popularized Johnson's recordings in the 1950s and 1960s entangled his music with their ideas of him as authentic, exotic, and otherworldly. Johnson, who died in 1938, cannot speak back to revivalists through autobiographical reinvention, but authors who use the Johnson trope in their fictional works do challenge and reinvent his mythology and reshape his place in blues music. Mack shows this by analyzing Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie, RL's Dream by Water Mosley, and various works by Geoffrey Becker and T.C. Boyle.Footnote 4 In Reservation Blues, the crossroads myth drives the plot, and Johnson is able to repay his debt to the devil and earn his spiritual freedom. In RL's Dream the Johnson-like character is a ghost and facilitates the main character's ability to become a storyteller. Here, Mack shows that it is possible to reinvent even the most entrenched blues tropes.
Contemporary blues-influenced rock musician Jack White wrote himself into the blues tradition in the 2000s, and his story is the focus of Chapter 4. At the beginning of his career, White wrote and performed lyrics that used blues signifiers, played Delta blues cover songs on vintage equipment, and foregrounded his own self-imposed luddite sensibilities to align himself with dominant ideas about authentic blues. Simultaneously, he broke with blues tropes by creating a pastiche of confusing sonic, visual, and biographical details: The vintage equipment he used was often from a later era than the songs he covered, he employed bold pop-art visual branding incongruous with the visual elements used to signify blues authenticity, and, oddly, he lied to the press about his relationship with his bandmate (an ex-wife who he said was his sister). As he wrote himself into the blues tradition, his absurd and outlandish persona helped him avoid critiques about his own authenticity and undeniable whiteness. White may operate within the tradition in many respects, but Mack highlights the racial essentialism present in his interviews with the press, wherein he explains blues as primitive and innocent. These actions, combined with White's more recent project of reissuing old blues records, hint at some of the major issues within the blues industry—a topic which Mack only alludes to in this monograph.
Mack focuses on blues apprenticeship in the final chapter. Formal apprenticeships are common in blues, and include the master-apprentice musician pairings often underwritten by state humanities boards, and informal apprenticeships formed by casual multigeneration friendships that develop organically at blues jams and in local music scenes. Mack's most engaging example of this practice examines Gary Clark, Jr., a young, Black, now-famous musician who learned a great deal about blues through an informal relationship with white traditional blues musician Jimmy Vaughan (the older brother of blues-rock luminary Stevie Ray Vaughan). Mack reveals several interesting commonly shared notions about authenticity in blues through Clark. Historical and contemporary Black blues musicians are perceived as instantly authentic by fans and critics because of their race, but “projections of authenticity directed at Black blues musicians, in particular, tend to overshadow their accomplishments as professionals in control of their own work and their personas, who are striving for commercial success” (7). Mack discusses how fans and critics therefore expect young Black blues musicians like Clark to remain faithful to traditional blues and are upset when they venture outside of a constructed notion of blues purity. This reduces Black musicians’ agency and self-determination and erases white mentors like Jimmy Vaughan from the narrative. Mack's careful analysis reveals the ways in which apprenticeships both function and are obscured in blues traditions.
By incorporating autobiographical storytelling into the concept of blues, this book is a groundbreaking work that will be foundational for scholars of blues, popular music, American studies, Black studies, and media studies. The book is aimed at scholarly audiences, but the writing is accessible and engaging enough for advanced undergraduates and general audiences. Mack's work offers a new analytical frame for considering who can participate in blues and how, while simultaneously locating and challenging reductive tropes and exploitative and appropriative participants. This work could be built upon by future scholars to include how the blues industry—including blues labels, nonprofits, blues societies, and the blues radio and festival circuit—factors into these conversations.
Lydia Warren is a musician and scholar based in Fairmont, West Virginia. She earned a PhD in music from the University of Virginia in 2021, a BA in music from Smith College and a Five College Consortium Certificate in ethnomusicology in 2014, and an AS in music from Middlesex Community College in 2011. Prior to and during her studies, she worked as a full-time internationally touring musician. She is the director of the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University.
