Wald wrote: "[M]y perspective includes the fact that Odum himself, in the book he published in 1925 with Guy Johnson, 'The Negro and His Songs,' was still carefully distinguishing that music from 'blues,' which they categorized as a modern, commercial style."

Looking through the book, I think Wald simply misread what's on pp. 149-150; I can't see what else he'd be trying to refer to. The sentence that spans pp. 149-150 says: "While the variations of the songs of the first and second classes [categories] would afford material for an interesting study, they are in reality not folk songs. Accordingly, only those that have been become adapted [the third class] are given in this collection." That collection is the folk stuff from 1905-1908 that Odum also presented in the _Journal Of American Folk-Lore_ back in the 1910s: the 12-bar "Knife-Song" with its lyrics about having the quote "blues" and so on.

Wald wrote to me four months ago: "I think that many of the folk songs Odum collected before 1909 are what I now would call blues music...." Yeah, me too.

I'm not sure how important it would be if Odum changed his mind about what a blues song is between 1925 and 1926, but I don't think we actually have evidence that he did.