Reviewers of Blues for an Alabama Sky frequently focus on the play's treatment of issues of race and gender in historical context. Freda Scott Giles, in the African American Review, compared Blues for an Alabama Sky to Cleage's plays Flyin' West (1992) and Bourbon at the Border (1997), commenting that, in all three, "Cleage seeks to bring us to grips with our American past and help us understand and acknowledge its impact on present conditions, especially with regard to issues of race and gender."

As critics have also observed, in Blues for an Alabama Sky, Cleage focuses on the unknown figures in a specific historical era, the ordinary people who make, and are made by, history, yet remain nameless in official historical accounts. Marta J. Effinger, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, points out that Blues for an Alabama Sky is an example of Cleage's "obsession with history...