Here's an example of Wald not knowing what he's talking about, at all, about early blues: "Blues is one of the great American popular music styles, not an obscure back-country folk art. There have been plenty of back-porch blues pickers, just as there have been plenty of garage rock bands, but they were never the music's driving force." That sounds very interesting, even revelatory, but does it matter that it's simply wrong? Howard Odum documented folk blues sung before 1909. Antonio Maggio heard a black guitarist play blues on a levee in about 1907. Emmet Kennedy heard folk blues on the street in about 1906. E.C. Perrow documented folk blues that was sung in Mississippi in 1909. The first publication of a blues song was three years after 1909, in 1912. Abbott and Seroff's extensive research has debunked Ma Rainey's claims about how early she was performing blues, and has shown how blues music only became popular among relatively small-time stage performers in roughly 1911-1912.

W.C. Handy and his peers admitted that blues music originated as folk music why? Because that... wasn't in their interest? Because it did?

Unfortunately, when Wald wrote his Robert Johnson book, he had read Stephen Calt's ridiculous 1990s book about Skip James. Calt had an absurd axe to grind with folkies in general, and also, as it happens, had apparently done little more actual research into the _earliest_ blues than Calt ever has. Calt distanced blues music from folk music inaccurately in his book because... well, because that made him feel good, is the only actual reason I can think of.