Joe: The text was addressed (and now confirmed) to "Mr. Offer." (To which she adds, if it's Joesphine or Joeslyn, no offense) Hope this helps.
FYI: Joseph (OP) you're "Dread" ;D

Blues is Jazz, etc:
I was tempted to follow Seagrove with that Bechet ragtime quote.
Bechet: "Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music."
Rosen, Critical Entertainment, Cambridge, Harvard U. Press, 2000. p.217
Note: Seagrove and everybody referenced in the Trib article were white.

And at the risk of blues drift I will add Armstrong on the same subject:
"At one time they was calling it levee camp music, then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up north I commenced to hear about jazz, Chicago style, Dixieland, swing. All refinements of what we played in New Orleans. But every time they change the name they got a bigger check. All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today – course it's all guitars now – used to hear that way back in the old sanctified churches where the sisters used to shout until their petticoats fell down. There ain't nothing new. Old soup used over."
"Music" Putnam's Monthly, 1:1, January 1953, p.119-120

Lomax, a few decades on:
"I discovered to my consternation that the rich traditions which my father and I had documented had virtually disappeared. Most young people are caught up in TV and the Hit Parade... simply don't know anything about the black folklore that their forebears had produced and which had sustained and entertained generations of Americans. We resolved to try and do something about this situation."
(My tattered notes of) VHS "Land Where the Blues Began", Beverly Hills, Pacific Arts Video; PBS Home Video, 1990. No time stamp, sorry.

And Wald (back to ragtime)
"The pop music world that began with ragtime is fiercely democratic. Whatever its underlying commercial foundations, it claims to be the music of all America, rich and poor, country and city, black and white (and yellow, red, and brown, when it bothers to acknowledge such subtleties). The only gap it does not strive to bridge is age: Each shift of genre blazons the arrival of a new generation and threatens all doubters with the ignominy of hunching over their canes and mumbling impotent imprecations as youth dances by." (Brutal... but fair.)
Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll, NY, Oxford, 2009, p.27