Incidentally, when Joseph writes, "Wald has acknowledged to me that he considers some of the _folk_ material Odum collected before 1909 to be what he calls blues music," he is absolutely right. My own taxonomy is that of a white blues musician raised in the 1960s, and I consider songs like "Pallet on the Floor" to be blues. So did Jelly Roll Morton, in 1939.

Does that mean that "Pallet on the Floor" was blues when Morton first heard it around the turn of the century?

My answer would be: maybe.

People born around the turn of the century in the Mississippi Delta tended to call "Pallet on the Floor" (at least, as played by rural musicians like Mississippi John Hurt) and songs like that "ragtime," which they distinguished from "blues"--a term they associated with the kind of music performed by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

I would not be surprised if people in New Orleans were already using the term "blues" for the older music, or music like it. Whereas older Delta musicians tended to talk about blues as something that arrived around 1920, older New Orleans musicians tended to talk about it as a popular style in the late 19th century--but they used the term for slow, dirty songs like Morton's version of "Pallet" and Buddy Bolden's "Funky Butt," not specifically for songs related to the 12-bar form. They were dance musicians, and for them "blues" seems to have distinguished a dance tempo, and a playing style associated with non-reading musicians, as compared to the more formal music of the Creole orchestras.

Joseph considers New Orleans musicians to be "fudging" when they called songs like "Careless Love" blues, apparently because for him "blues" has a single definition, which those songs don't fit. That's fine. His taxonomy is his taxonomy, like Morton's was Morton's. I'm interested in both, and accept neither as definitive.