Hi Karen,

I don't think any of the quoting of Hagstrom Miller I did in the amazon review took what he was claiming "out of context." He made outrageous claims, which some readers thought sounded very interesting, because they would be very interesting if they were true. That you learned about Peabody's article because of Hagstrom Miller is cool and has no bearing on whether e.g. "Academic collectors were particularly slow to associate the blues with folklore" is true (which it isn't at all, it's ridiculous).

"I wondered what dates you were thinking of for 'earliest blues music' and also what your definition might be." The earliest decade we have good evidence for what I call blues music, which is very similar to what most blues fans call blues music, is the 1890s. For my rough definition of blues music see my post of 28 May 15 - 12:54 PM.

"What there is not in these early pieces is any explicit mention of 'the blues'." "The blues" are mentioned in two of the songs (from 1905-1908) that Odum gave in 1911.

"othering" You seem to be interested in the fact that whites born in about 1885 tended to say lots of stuff that was stereotypical and the like. They sure did. The black street guitarists Odum met were different from him in some ways and similar to him in others, and I think we can all agree that his perception of that situation would have been partly right and partly wrong. The relevance of all that to his ability to transcribe a lyric is none at all.

"commercial music did influence what African Americans were singing at work in the Delta at that period of time." Who disputes that blacks in the Delta and the like knew commercial numbers in e.g. 1901 and 1891? Not me. I (and basically everyone before Calt, who unfortunately Elijah read) dispute that pro musicians helped invent blues music in particular, because there happens to be zero credible evidence of _that_, and Handy and his peers were continually saying that they were inspired in their written blues by earlier folk blues music culture, which was mostly contrary to their selfish interest, but they were being honest, and (to make one comparison that there are plenty of parallel examples to) the 1905 that Elbert Bowman heard a "K.C. Moan" variant by from black folk singers is five years before Johnnie Woods was singing blues on stage in Florida.

"such as Robert Johnson" Elijah is _great_ on Robert Johnson in his 1930s context. Studying the 1930s isn't a way to research e.g. what black folk and stage musicians were doing in 1905-1910, as Elijah's ignorance about the latter topic shows. Elijah's website currently still says (even though I've been giving him heads up for over a decade) "first 'blues' was a black pop style... it retroactively became a folk style...." As with those Hagstrom Miller quotes, that has the virtue of sounding really interesting, and the drawback of being complete baloney.