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american studies
Staging the Blues
From Tent Shows to Tourism
paige a. mcginley
Desire and Disaster in New Orleans
Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory
lynnell l. thomas
“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.”—GAYLE WALD, author of Shout,
Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta
Tharpe
“This highly original book fills a significant gap in the literature on New
Orleans and on tourism in general by offering a rare look at African American
tourism within the dominant (white) tourism narrative. Desire and Disaster
in New Orleans will be vital reading for scholars working on New Orleans
and those examining representations of African Americans in modern
American culture. It is filled with astute analyses based on Lynnell L.
Thomas’s impressive interpretations of sources ranging from websites to
interviews.”—ANTHONY J. STANONIS, author of Creating the Big Easy:
New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918–1945
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.
Staging
the Blues
TO TOURISM
FROM TENT SHOWS
PAIGE A. MCGINLEY
Paige A. McGinley is Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at
Washington University in St. Louis.
Most of the narratives packaged for
New Orleans’s many tourists cultivate
a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine,
dance—while simultaneously targeting
black people and their communities
as sources and sites of political, social,
and natural disaster. In this timely
DESirE &
book, the Americanist and New Orleans
DiSAStEr in nEw orLEAnS native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into
the relationship between tourism,
cultural production, and racial politics.
She carefully interprets the racial narratives
embedded in tourist websites,
tourism, race, and Historical Memory Lynnell L. thomas
travel guides, business periodicals,
and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the
stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both
before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees
of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism
industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourismfocused
businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations.
Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas
highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to
create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial
inequality and structural inequity.
Lynnell L. Thomas is Associate Professor of American Studies at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston.
32
AMERICAN STUDIES/MUSIC
September 296 pages, 28 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5745–2, $24.95/£15.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5731–5, $89.95/£59.00
AMERICAN STUDIES/AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
August 272 pages, 32 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5728–5, $23.95/£15.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5714–8, $84.95/£55.00