Reviews
Book Review: Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
Paige McGinley, Journal of Popular Music
Studies
“Fictional Blues is an outstanding contribution to contemporary popular music scholarship. It should be widely read by blues scholars, of course. But it should be taken up beyond that: anyone concerned with race, performance, and authenticity politics in popular music studies should read this confident and erudite book . . . Mack offers us a new way to listen to what we thought we knew and to appreciate anew the artistry, savvy, and ingenuity of blues music, and the people who make it.”
Black Arts, Black Women,
Black Politics
Elliott H. Powell, American Literary History
“Fictional Blues is a rich interdisciplinary study of the potential of storytelling to contest the racist, classist, and masculinist strictures of blues authenticity, . . . open[ing] up new possibilities for Black cultural research, for Black being, and, ultimately, for Black futures.”
Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
Lydia Warren, Journal of the Society for American Music
“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.”
Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White
Clifford Thompson, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Tradition is a crucial part of human life, a way for us to make sense of our existence. The question becomes: How does one carry on a tradition, in the face of changing realities, without being stifled by it? That could be said to be the question at the heart of Kimberly Mack’s illuminating, thought-provoking, refreshingly broad-minded new book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White.”
THE READING ROOM: Sorting Out the Fact and the Fiction in Blues
Henry Carrigan, No Depression
“Mack’s tour-de-force study explores the ways that autobiographical fiction imbues artists with a power to reclaim their identities and to tell their own stories in their own words, with fresh and significant readings and re-readings of artists including Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Shug Avery, Robert Johnson, Debbie Bond, Amy Winehouse, Gary Clark Jr., and Rhiannon Giddens.”