Kimberly Mack

Kimberly Mack is an associate professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Toledo. She’s the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). Dr. Mack is writing her second book, The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic), about the BIPoC and white women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. Her 33 1/3 book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, will be published in Spring 2023. She is also a music critic/journalist and memoirist whose work has appeared in Longreads, Music Connection, Relix, No Depression, PopMatters, and Hot Press.

Current Work:

Dr. Mack’s book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, was published in 2020 by the University of Massachusetts Press as part of their African American Intellectual History series. It 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. 

The familiar story of Delta musician Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for his guitar virtuosity, and the violent stereotypes evoked by the Black “bad man” of the early twentieth-century American imagination—like the mythical figure, Stagolee, who murdered a man over a Stetson hat—undergird the racial myths surrounding “authentic” blues expression that are beloved by many blues fans and critics. But far from having ready-made racial and cultural identities, these blues makers have fashioned worlds through their own fictionalized autobiographical and biographical storytelling and self-made personas. Using examples culled from literature and contemporary music, including close readings of literary passages, historical and contemporary interviews, live concert performances, music videos, and songs, Fictional Blues shows how fictional and real-life blues artists create these self-made identities in the works of American writers as disparate as Sherman Alexie, Alice Walker, and Walter Mosley, and in the music of modern blues performers such as Gary Clark Jr., Amy Winehouse, Rhiannon Giddens, and Jack White.

Dr. Mack’s second book project, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic, is a continuation of her research highlighting the synergies between African American and ethnic American literature and music. When most people envision an American rock music critic—particularly one from the early era: 1966-1980—they imagine someone white and male. And, certainly, the writers at the forefront of the new rock critical establishment were, at least initially, white men. The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism will uncover the hidden histories of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and white women writers who helped develop American rock criticism and journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. These writers contributed groundbreaking works to established rock music magazines, like Rolling Stone and Creem, as well as underground music magazines and zines; Black and brown newspapers; and monthlies, weeklies, and dailies that were not necessarily focused on music but offered reviews or occasional features about the famous rockers of the day. The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism is the book that will let these voices, gathered together for the first time, speak.

Research Area Keyword(s):

20th- and 21st-century African American and ethnic American literature; race; autobiographical narratives; American popular music; American music criticism and journalism