According to the first-hand account of police detective Lieutenant Ira Cooper (born 1877), who heard plenty of music at dives whether he liked it or not, St. Louis pianist Bill Dooley wrote a version of "Frankie" about the death of fellow St. Louis pianist Al Britt in late 1899. Dooley very likely would have known "Stack-a-lee," which we know was around by 1897. Those 12-bar bad man ballads tended to blend into each other. Not just floaters about buggies and hacks and the like, as we often hear mentioned, but lines from "Boll Weevil" into lines in the ballads about men, for instance.

"Hop Joint" was apparently better-known in roughly 1901 than we usually see suggested, and as Peter Muir has pointed out, the Scarborough version of "Hop Joint" that mentions Bill Bailey hints at the possibility of a folk ballad about Bill Bailey that inspired the pop songs about Bill Bailey. (There is no reasonable doubt that the clique of songwriters who wrote the pop Bill Bailey cycle were being significantly influenced by black folk music.)

As far as we can tell, all of that cross-fertilization of clearly 12-bar ballads in many states -- from "The Carrier Line" to "Fighting In The War With Spain," and as far as we can tell all starting with "The Bully" in maybe 1893 (Handy's autobiography isn't entirely reliable on dates) -- all that was going on for about _a decade_ before the folk blues songs that explicitly mentioned having the "blues" arose (in about 1905 or 1906).

As if that weren't complicated enough, the clearly 12-bar songs also blend into the pretty nearly 12-bar songs that go straight from IV to V, a la "Take A One On Me," and if you go far enough down that road and you get to tunes related to "Take A One On Me" that no one seemed to think were 12-bar such as "Alabama Bound," and also there's the 8-bar IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I or roughly 8-bar songs similar to "Bucket's Got A Hole In It" or the Pratcher Brothers' "If It's All Night Long" -- there's no reasonable doubt that that's _all_ connected (possibly all before anyone put the word "blues" in any of them). Phew!

Part of Hurt's charm was that he didn't know what the songs were really about very well, which ironically is good, because he was effectively a man with a great memory taking snapshots in roughly 1902-1917 of a lot of different people's songs that were around on front porches, next to train tracks, etc. As opposed to say Leadbelly with whom you have to sort out whether he had decided an English ballad would sound good if mixed with something else on _that_ particular day.