The Alan Govenar piece quoted above is full of misinformation (some of it obviously consisting of garbling even further similar misinformation in _Big Road Blues_ by David Evans).

"Nobody There" does not have a special relationship to blues music relative to other music of its era; Gates Thomas did not write about "Nobody There" in 1890, but many years later; Thomas recalled that he heard "Nobody There" in _approximately_ 1890; Thomas was inconsistent over the years in his writings about when he first heard "Boll Weevil," so he's not particularly reliable on dates anyway; "Nobody There" was not the only black folk song that he included in the particular article it was in; Thomas's article did not "indicate" anything about "Nobody There" having anything special to do with "blues" music.

We don't know whether the fragment "Baby take a look on me" that Charles Peabody encountered in about 1902 made up part, at the time, of what we'd call the song "Baby Take A Look At Me." Which blues song Jelly Roll Morton sang was a "variant" of "Alabama Bound," as opposed to say the "Alabama Bound" that he sang?

"Blues music" was named in about 1909 after the songs that increasingly mentioned having the quote "blues" in their lyrics during about 1907-1909. These songs were about disappointments in romantic relationships. The black people who made up those songs of about 1907-1909 were not "newly freed" slaves. They tended to be young. Older black people tended to dislike those new fad songs of the young people as inferior to earlier songs.

Three-line stanzas with AAB lyrics were in Child ballads. Early blues did not more closely resemble field hollers and shouts melodically than black folk ballads. Black folk ballads were affected by "African percussive rhythms and call-and-response singing." There is no evidence that the earliest blues "blended the sacred and the secular." (There were ever any blues that blended the secular with the sacred, eventually, representing a tiny proportion of all blues.) There is no reason to think that Lemon Jefferson wasn't successful with Dallas record buyers once he was a recoringd artist. Many Texas guitarists did not use the supposed "Texas style" mentioned. There was no one "the modern sound" on guitar. Durham and Christian were not the first to use electric guitars in bands. Saxophone remained the dominant instrument in R&B well after T-Bone Walker became popular, and that's why roughly half of all R&B records made in the early '50s didn't have a guitar on them, let alone a guitar soloing.