It's undoubtedly true that swing preexisted jazz. That's not what my point is. My point is that swing and blues were actually well known not only among blacks and not only among white musicians but throughout the general public LONG before the term is believed to have come into general usage. It doesn't make sense that white musicians and singers were making records with "Swing" in the titles in the early 1900s if the white public didn't know what swing was.

Why would Hart Wand or Gus Haenschen publish or record blues for a white public that suppposedly would not have known much about it? Because the public DID know about it. But standard histories of the growth and development of blues don't say this. Sometime between 1916 and 1926, whites lost contact with the blues. We don't know why. But we must consider that the popularity and spread of blues was to some degree helped along in the early days by white writers and musicians who peddled it to a white public. That whites today love blues and have learned to play it quite was really a rediscovery not a first-time discovery. But that's not how we're taught about it.

And as far as swing goes, whites would appear to have had as much to do with its evolution as blacks from the earliest times and that blacks were borrowing as much from whites as the other way around. It's not really that difficult to understand but our histories don't seem to want to admit this for the reasons I've mentioned.