Many of the old time Blues musicians said that they were often paid a sum of money by store keepers to sit in the back of the store on Market day and play, and that they were sums of money by lumber companies to come out to the lumber camps and play--to me, this seems comparable to a prince or merchant paying a composer to create a piece to perform in the chamber--

As I think of it, most of America's large landholders gentry tended to be European aristocracy who discreetly dropped the titles when they moved to the Ol' Plantation, so it isn't inconceivable that patronage from the same families supported Mozart and Robert Johnson--