Elijah, calling the Tutwiler guitarist e.g. (about 1904) a blues guitarist has never been considered a live issue in the study of blues music -- except by you, you say.

People began talking about quote "blues" music in about 1907. Under your proposed definition of blues music in which people must have been talking about quote "blues" music by then in order for any so-defined blues music to exist, your repeated claims that blues music started out as pop music and later became folk music and the like* are _still_ wrong. Do you understand that that proposed definition doesn't somehow dig you out of that, at all?

Here's a quote from Elijah: "Blues is one of the great American popular music styles, not an obscure back-country folk art. There have been plenty of back-porch blues pickers, just as there have been plenty of garage rock bands, but they were never the music's driving force."* Wrong. And as I say, the unusual definition of blues music Elijah wants us to look at doesn't even succeed in _impacting on_ the fact that it is wrong.

(*Elijah posted this here, but the dispute Elijah and I have is about whether non-folk musicians helped invent blues music, as he's claimed over and over, and is not related to the Delta topic of this thread. Elijah claimed completely wrongly here what I claim about "field hollers," which isn't central to what we're talking about, but is notable.)