Lyrics & Knowledge Personal Pages Record Shop Auction Links Radio & Media Kids Membership Help
The Mudcat Cafesj



User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
GUEST,Joseph Scott Who started the Delta blues myth? (231* d) RE: Who started the Delta blues myth? 30 Jan 19


"Charles Peabody was astounded by how much 'early blues' music he heard in the Delta in his 1901 and 1902 visits." There is no blues music in his 1903 article:
https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/charles-peabody.pdf
When did Peabody say he was astounded by what, specifically?

I don't know why you refer to pro blues as "blues as we know it." We have countless recordings of folk blues. We know both.

"Musicians were able to transfer... folk 'blues' into a familiar blues form and common structure" No, the familiar blues form was used by the folk musicians and adopted by the pro musicians. Pro musicians who copied folk blues deserve no credit for inventing what they copied, only whatever they didn't copy (such as Enrique Smith's beautifully original "Wandering Blues" and W.C. Handy's beautifully original "Harlem Blues").

Alan Lomax loved to talk about "hollers" -- defining them remarkably inconsistently over the years -- and fields, far more than he loved to present plausible evidence connecting "hollers" to blues music.

Booker White was relatively young. W.C. Handy heard "Got No More Home Than A Dog" about 10 years before Booker was born, in Indiana, so if Booker honestly didn't know that, so what.

"HUGE 90% Black population there, therefore there were more field workers and field hollers, so more 'Blues Influences'" You can't rely on where the most black people were to tell you were a black style originated, it doesn't work. Did ragtime come from wherever the most black people were? Hip hop?

"What myth? Other than Alan Lomax's book title 'The Land Where the Blues Began', I don't think I've ever heard any blues researcher say that blues music was exclusively 'born' in the Mississippi Delta." Then you didn't read the whole OP. Sam Charters is quoted there: "it was in the Mississippi delta counties that the first blues were sung."

I appreciate your mention of 1905 to 1910 and folk to non-folk, because that's an issue Elijah doesn't get or has written about as if he doesn't get -- and the latest Abbott and Seroff book is also painfully misleading about, although their earlier Ragged But Right wasn't at all, which makes me think one of them finished up one book and the other the other.

You presented zero actual evidence that the Delta was special with regard to blues music as of e.g. 1905 because no one has any.


Post to this Thread -

Back to the Main Forum Page

By clicking on the User Name, you will requery the forum for that user. You will see everything that he or she has posted with that Mudcat name.

By clicking on the Thread Name, you will be sent to the Forum on that thread as if you selected it from the main Mudcat Forum page.
   * Click on the linked number with * to view the thread split into pages (click "d" for chronologically descending).

By clicking on the Subject, you will also go to the thread as if you selected it from the original Forum page, but also go directly to that particular message.

By clicking on the Date (Posted), you will dig out every message posted that day.

Try it all, you will see.