Hi Joseph,

I see what you mean on Odum 1911. I think neither of us would describe his blues songs / stanzas / lines as "neatly organized into a single subgroup waiting for a name," but I agree that he does relate some of the blues stuff he collected to other blues stuff he collected, and sometimes seems to see a pattern. I also agree it is especially true of one group of songs, from song 8 (“Po’ Boy Long Way from Home) to 14 (“Baby, You Sho’ Lookin’ Warm”), where not everything is blues, but where there is a lot of blues material.

On the two published AAB blues before 1915: I suppose we are talking about Le Roy White’s “Negro Blues” (1912), and Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914).

One of my early “unconvincing” examples evoked above is related to White’s “Negro Blues.” In January 1915, the Shreveport Journal (LA) made a comment on a performance by Ruby Darby, a white singer, later to be billed as “The Gal with the Blues,” and whom we know performed at least Handy’s “Memphis Blues,” and later “Joe Turner Blues”—her picture is on the cover of the latter’s score.

The author writes: “Her ‘Blues’ song, after the fashion of the levee darkey . . . took the house as would a tornado.”

The potential objections to it being a relevant example are countless: it is more than possible that “Her ’Blues’ song” here meant “Her song whose title she gives as ‘The Blues’”; the author may have described the performance as much as the song; we don’t know what in the song would have been seen as “after the fashion” of black (presumably) workers heard on levees; and more importantly, it could be argued that as late as January 1915, the “fashion” of levee workers could just as well have originated in popular blues. However, it seems to me that the comment can also be understood as “Her blues song, of the kind traditionally sung by black workers on levees, that is, that have been sung for far more than five years”

In articles of the same period, Darby is mainly reported as performing the “Memphis Blues,” yet, in the above article, she is reported singing:
“My Head Ain’t Made O’ Bone,
My Head Ain’t Made O’ Bone,
I’ve sang a Million verses,
But I ain’t No graphophone.”
The latter AAB stanza is found close to verbatim in White’s “Negro Blues,” which Abbott and Seroff called “a monument to early folk-blues literature.”