Joseph,

Trying to make it short on a tricky issue:

I agree that whether or not authors had (yet) acknowledged blues as a genre is irrelevant as to when these authors started saying that some of the songs that we now call blues were folk songs.

“Odum / 1911,” “Will H. Thomas / 1912,” or “J. Lomax / 1912” are therefore major milestones, no matter that none of these authors saw “the songs that we now call blues” as constitutive of a specific subset (of folk songs) at the time.

Yet, I don’t find it worthless in and of itself to know when a mainstream audience (a large part of which would not have been exposed to folk blues prior to the rise of popular blues) would have first heard commentators claim that the very concept or form of “blues songs,” was of folk origins.

Your 1919 examples, in your “Delta” thread, seem very compelling to me, in that they feature both the idea of blues as a genre and the idea—if not always the word—of its folk origins.

“J. W. Johnson 1917,” or “Literary Digest (in fact Walter Kingsley) 1917” seem to me to refer to one folk song (no matter how many variants of it these authors may have encountered at this point).

“J. Lomax 1917” is closer to a very loosely defined idea of a blues genre, be it for the title of the article, associated with the many blues lines/stanzas/songs he quotes (including what he considers a single song with many titles [/variants], one of which is “The Blues”)—along with many non-blues, sometimes not even secular ones, though.

If we don’t require the use of the word “folk,” there may be earlier examples than your 1919 ones, or my less compelling 1918 one, or even “J. Lomax 1917,” that would display both the idea of “the blues as a genre” and the idea of its folk origins.

I tend to think, for instance, that when Handy described what the Tutwiler guitarist played (likely before 1906) as a “typical blues,” in “How I Came to Write the Memphis Blues” (1916), both himself and most readers would have understood it exactly the way we understand “folk blues” today.

I can maybe think of one or two more, around the same time, yet likely not convincing enough to be listed here.

P.S. Since we are mentioning J. Lomax’s encounters with the blues, in case you missed it, I had posted info on your “John Lomax’s credibility” thread