I tried to post a message about this several days ago. Unfortunately, my computer crashed immediately afterwards and, on getting going again, I find the message hasn't landed.

The conversation has moved on quite a bit since then but, FWIW, here's a re-post. It might actualy land this time.

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Despite having been an avid Blues fan for over fifty years, I have never come across the slightest scrap of evidence to even suggest that the blues was born in the Delta. Moreover, my feeling is that the Blues did not arrise directly as a result of slavery, or as a survival of African musical heritage.

Rather, the idiom emerged sometime around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, as a result of social alienation which had been brought on by the failure of reconstruction and by the withdrawal of the northern army in 1876.

IE., with no army to stop them, white southerners were free to terrorise the black population with an avalanche of fiery crosses, lynchings, burnings, beatings and what have you. The effect of that campaign was to mentally unsettle black people and the musical consequence of that unsettlement was the Blues.

Such alienation was by no means confined to Mississippi, but in fact was replicated to a greater or lesser extent all over the South. Hence , rather than seeing the Blues as a product particularly of Mississippi, we find the idiom emerging, more or less around the same time, pretty well everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line.

Against that, it's worth pointing out that the Blues often seems to be at its most emotionally intense in the Delta. However, one might speculate that social conditions in the Delta were probably worse than anywhere else. If so, we can also speculate that the musical consequences of those conditions would be somewhere around the extremes of emotional expression.

But emotional intesity and appalling treatment do not autmatically equate with origins.
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