From Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff's "'They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me': Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, And The Commercial Ascendancy Of The Blues," emphasis added: "Clearly it was at the insistence of the southern vaudeville audiences that the blues, a previously submerged aspect of African American _folk_ culture, ascended the stage.... When southern vaudevillians embraced _folk-blues_ concoctions in their stage repertory, the audience shouted loud in recognition...." "... John H. Williams specialized in the comic adaptation of the up-to-date Southern _folk_ idioms from which blues was gleaned." "String Beans, Baby Seals, Johnnie Woods and Little Henry, Willie and Lulu Too Sweet, Laura Smith -- these were some of the first 'blue diamonds in the rough' [quoting W.C. Handy, who said blues music originated as folk music] to rise above the anonymous street corners, barrelhouses, juke joints, railroad depots, and one-room country shacks of _folk-blues_ literature. They were the fathers and mothers of the blues on the American stage." "The implication is that by 1909 the term blues was known to describe a distinct _folk_-musical genre...." From Abbott and Seroff's _Ragged But Right: ... The Dark Pathway To Blues And Jazz_: "By mid-decade [of the 1910s], blues singing had begun to make a permanent home in tended minstrelsy [by black performers]. W.C. Handy's early blues publications [which started in 1912]... initiated [that] trend."