Bolden, who liked folk music, apparently knew any blues because he apparently knew the blues song about the 2:19. Meanwhile, the idea that comic insult songs such as "Funky Butt" or happy songs about getting laid such as "Make Me A Pallet On The Floor" (both of those folk songs were known across the South) ought to be thought of as "blues" songs is pretty unmotivated. Generally speaking, writers on jazz of the '40s-'60s liked the idea that the earliest jazz was heavily influenced by blues, so they wrote that the earliest jazz was heavily influenced by blues. As for whether a performance of "High Society" really needed to be bluesy to be by one of the bands we think of as the jazz bands, of course not.