Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White By Kimberly Mack. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.

Abstract

for too long, these songs might finally be given the hearing they deserve (181). A Sound History offers a foundation for such a hearing, but does not take the work of a systematic study of the songs upon itself; musical and lyrical detail is examined largely to verify the songs, rather than to consider their aesthetic and political claims. A full examination of the material thus remains a task for future scholarship. Since the book is peppered with invitations to examine the Gellert collection at the Archive of Traditional Music at Indiana University, it would seem this is Garabedian’s hope, too. Such future work might consider further why dismissive attitudes toward Gellert’s collection have persisted long after the postwar conflicts that generated them faded, a question to which Garabedian sketches only one possible answer. Folk and blues scholarship, he suggests in the Epilogue, is a small field, deeply influenced and still well-populated by figures who came of age during the 1960s revival, and it remains an interpretive community whose politics, while progressive, still hold fast to the romantic racialism of their revivalist forebears (177). But as demonstrated by the book’s comparison of the 1930s and 1960s folk revivals, the continuity of personnel does not guarantee a continuity of politics. Further work in this area might, then, ask: What are the continuities between Cold War anticommunism and the neoliberalism of the 2000s, or the rightist populism of the 2010s? Why have some disciplines, such as History and American Studies, been quicker to develop a more sanguine approach to the “dialectic of resistance between ‘red’ and ‘black’” than music studies (12)? Beyond the confines of academic politics, is there space in the contemporary Left, too often mired in bad-faith battles between “class-reductionism” and “racial liberalism,” for this kind of historical example? As the book strongly argues, the lines between academic and national politics are finer than it might be comfortable to believe. As I write, several states have passed, or are in the process of passing laws that would make the songs in Gellert’s volume, and indeed Garabedian’s exegesis, once again “verboten” (29), at least within public education systems. As a study in the racial character of U.S. political suppression, then, Garabedian’s book could not be more timely. As a contribution to U.S. music history, it speaks equally to folklore, cultural history, and music studies without sacrificing accessibility or rigor. And as a validation of a radical tradition, a testament to the possibility of a politics beyond the meagre rewards of whiteness’s “psychological wage,” it is essential.