"I'll ask you again, Elijah, what credible evidence do you have that pop musicians contributed to the invention of blues music? Using any working definition of blues music you like."

As I was saying, Elijah Wald doesn't have credible evidence that pop musicians contributed to the invention of blues music.

The wording "Invention Of The Blues" in the title of Wald's 2004 book, combined with his inaccurate claims relating to early blues music and folk music, including in that book, are likely to mislead people, because blues music was invented by black folk musicians before 1910, and thus that invention had nothing to do with how any "revivalists" or the like happened to take an interest in or think about folk blues or non-folk blues later. Nothing at all.

Wald's website currently says: "... [F]irst [blues] was a black pop style, and it remained a black pop style until the 1960s. Then, it retroactively became a folk style...." Blues music never "retroactively became" folk music. (Nor did people like Peggy Seeger and Alan Lomax only take interest in the likes of Elizabeth Cotten and the Pratcher brothers as late as the 1960s, for that matter.)

Wald said in 2004 (_New York Times_) that "the blues was pop music -- it simply wasn't folk music." That is a bizarrely wrong statement, given that blues music was folk music continuously from before 1910 -- e.g. the three-lines-per-stanza "Knife-Song" about having the quote "blues" that Howard Odum heard from a folk musician before 1909 -- to decades later. Wald has acknowledged to me that he considers some of the _folk_ material Odum collected before 1909 to be what he calls blues music. If you're thinking, but that doesn't add up, yeah, it doesn't.