In Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, Kimberly Mack offers a welcome spin on debates about blues musicians’ supposed authenticity (debates frequently expressed in racial terms) that have characterized blues performance, reception, and (often) scholarship since White listeners, collectors, and performers got in on the act. Without diminishing the significant contributions on this topic by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Elijah Wald, and Marybeth Hamilton, among others, Mack presents the reader with a question that is both sly and artful, insightful and provocative: what if it’s all an act?
I am, admittedly, simplifying for effect. But the fact remains that Fictional Blues offers a new way of thinking about old questions by posing an approach to blues’ narrative self-invention that redirects readers away from perennial debates such as “Does blues music belong to Black people? Do non-Black people have a legitimate right to play it? Do Black...