Very interesting article. The authors seem to have done an extraordinary amount of research.

That the blues originated in black vaudeville is hardly implausible. Certainly it seems more plausible than the idea that the genre was somehow spread in a relatively few years by rural musicians who were confined almost entirely to the Mississippi Delta and were essentially unable to travel or communicate with the outside world.

If the blues were much older than, say, 1900, early blues songs should have shown up in the Lomax collections. Did they?

The blues-type notes in "Yellow Man" are hard to miss. What was the background of composer "Jack the Bear"?