"Many songs, including 'John Henry,' can be called 'blues' in the broadest sense if they include 'blue notes.'" Black musicians about Frank Stokes' age did not use "blues" to refer to anything with a bent note in it, or even close, and there is no evidence that any black musician used the expression "blue note" about the earliest blues music. (White writers of the 1910s did.)

Blues with four-line stanzas appear in Howard Odum's pre-1909 material, four-line stanzas are common in the blues song families that can actually be traced to before about 1910, and blues with four-line stanzas were known to the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Rev. Gary Davis, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Peg Leg Howell, Skip James, William Moore, Henry Thomas, Jesse Fuller, Charley Jordan, etc.