Here are more examples of variations on that "... blues but too damned mean to cry" lyric:

Included in a speech bubble over a cartoon of bluesman Butler May in a 1914 newspaper, but as "Got de blues but I ain't gwine to cry."

Photos of May:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=121243192

Heard by Cammilla Breazeale of Louisiana, included in Scarborough 1925. (There were a mother and daughter named Cammilla Breazeale in Natchitoches, born in 1865 and about 1890.)

Heard by Henry Francis Parks in "the southwest," included in Sandburg 1926. Parks was from Kentucky, born in about 1895, and he spent years in Montana and in Illinois, but he lived and performed in Texas in 1916. (He moved from El Paso to Butte in 1917.)