Yes, Stim, I do hear some blue notes, but Bessie Jones wasn't born till 1902. By the time the Singers were recorded by Alan Lomax, blue notes had evidently been characteristic of African-American singing for at least 25 years.

Remember, I'm *not* saying that the blues scale developed only around 1910, only that there's no evidence for it before then. That's pretty much the established view among blues scholars.

Blues fans are more likely to assume romantically that the scale goes way back in African-American (or West African) history.

There are many reasons why a sung melody might defy transcription: irregular timing and syncopation, for example, or ad lib harmonies. These seem to feature in much African-American traditional singing as well. Early writers said that Anglo-American chanteys were "wild" and defied transcription, yet they don't feature a blues scale.

I'm just surprised that if theoretically "off-key" notes were central to the songs Odum and Garrison heard that they didn't say anything more specific.

On the other hand, blue notes are so characteristic of AA song for as long as we have recordings of it, their use must go back before ca1900.

It may be that the notes first became "standardized" (if that's the word) in so-called "field hollers," which tended to be spontaneously expressive and unbound by standard musical practice. Perhaps such "hollering" really is centuries old. It's exactly the sort of thing that *nobody* would have bothered to describe in detail before the twentieth century.

At some point, presumably, the vocal freedom of the "holler" began to be applied to songs and guitar runs.

That could have happened anywhere, and undoubtedly in more than one place over a period of years. (This is called "polygenesis": a repeated rather than a one-time invention from which everything later flows.)

As for "accidentals" in other music, I think we're talking about two related but different things. The accidentals are mere ornaments. Modern "blues notes" are intrinsic to the scale.

But any accidentals heard repeatedly by slaves in religious hymns might also have accustomed many singers to use them more widely and insistently.

Both the emotional "blues" and the independently named "blue notes" clearly influenced the name of the genre. It would be wrong to single out one or the other as "the" origin.

I tend to agree that the name most likely came from "outside," and that the earliest blues singers might not have used it to describe the music. They were musicians, not theoreticians. What we call a blues scale would just have been another technique. Why should a folk musician bother to categorize it differently from any other way of playing?

Again, just thinking out loud.