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<\/a>Dr. Kimberly Mack is a scholar of African American literature and American popular music at The University of Toledo. Her book, \u201cFictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White,\u201d will be published on Dec. 18.<\/p><\/div>\n
A scholar of African American literature and American popular music at The University of Toledo explores in her forthcoming book how blues artists \u2014 both Black and non-Black literary and real-life blues musicians \u2014 use their work to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic and gendered oppression.<\/p>\n
\u201cFictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White\u201d<\/a> by Dr. Kimberly Mack, UToledo assistant professor of English, is scheduled to be published Friday, Dec. 18, by University of Massachusetts Press as part of its African American Intellectual History series.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Fictional Blues\u2019 is the story of how a range of blues artists, both real and imagined, invented their own personas independent of the so-called authentic blues, which is often predicated on the notion that Black men and women from poor or working-class backgrounds are more naturally suited to understand, and thus perform, the blues honestly,\u201d Mack said. \u201cFar from having ready-made racial and cultural identities, these blues makers have instead fashioned worlds through their own fictionalized autobiographical and biographical storytelling and self-made personas.\u201d<\/p>\n Moving from early singers such as Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton and Ethel Waters to contemporary musicians such as Amy Winehouse and Rhiannon Giddens, Mack challenges outdated notions of blues authenticity, determining that compelling blues storytellers can be found in varied races, genders, classes and geographical areas.<\/p>\n Through tall-tale telling, or the blurring of fact and fiction, Mack says early architects of blues myths took control of their own narratives to reclaim their power in the face of racism, patriarchy and poverty.<\/p>\n Mack uses Bessie Smith, the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and \u201930s, as an example, explaining how her persona as a \u201ctransgressive\u201d woman flouted white standards of female respectability \u201cwith her frank lyrics about sex, substance abuse and domestic violence and her openly bisexual lifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, Rainey in the song \u201cProve It On Me Blues\u201d brags about her conquests with women and \u201cdares\u201d the listener to \u201cprove\u201d her relationships.<\/p>\n That fearless and sexually independent legacy echoes in the representation of Shug Avery, the blueswoman at the center of Alice Walker\u2019s book \u201cThe Color Purple.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Mack begins her book with Jack White, who as a member of the White Stripes used \u201ca fabricated autobiographical backstory to sidestep the thorny issue of blues authenticity and whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBy referring to his ex-wife as his \u2018big sister,\u2019 he engaged rural stereotypes focused on sexual intrigue, family kinship and transgressive desire that are part of blues mythology and legend,\u201d Mack said. \u201cThe intrigue of not knowing the true relationship between the two members of the White Stripes compelled music journalists and fans to want to know more about them.\u201d<\/p>\n Mack engages a variety of platforms including literary passages, song lyrics, musical performances, music videos and historical and contemporary interviews. Her foray into blues history took her to Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, and Clarksdale and Oxford, Miss.<\/p>\n In the book’s Preface and Acknowledgements, Mack credits her UToledo students for their contributions to her literary effort.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you to my incredible graduate students at The University of Toledo, specifically students in my fall 2016 graduate seminar \u2018The Autobiographical Impulse in 20th-Century American Blues Literature, Drama, and Music,\u2019 who helped me to think through my theorizing about unconventional autobiographical articulation, and where I had the chance to revisit some key literary and musical texts,\u201d Mack said. \u201c<\/em>Thank you also to the students in my spring 2020 \u2018Contemporary Literary Theory and Criticism\u2019 graduate seminar who reminded me to clarify a key idea in the introduction to this book.\u201d<\/p>\n The book is available for preorder at the UMass Press website<\/a>. Use promo code MAS006\u00a0to receive 30% off with free shipping through August 2021.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s website<\/a> features a Spotify playlist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Fictional Blues\u2019 explores how blues artists use their work to invent personas that resist racial, social, economic and gendered oppression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":875,"featured_media":62563,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,60,73,7,43],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62561"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62596,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62561\/revisions\/62596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.utoledo.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>