Stewie's appraisal is great. I would add that blues grew out of, or along side of, ragtime, and a lot of the early blues musicians mixed rags and blues in their repertoire. In fact, the early blues was not "stereotyped," it had a wide variety of forms and progressions. Only in the last 30 years has the blues come to mean a 12 bar I IV V progression like those you hear on beer commercials... I associate that kind of playing with BB King, although he was able to rise above his own set style on occasion. "Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jivin too..." Brad http://www.camasnet.com/~asondahl/music.html