> the practice would have been around as artifice/humour since at least the days of Nicolò Amati. Lute players Like John Dowland would have known the technique, but how to notate it in tablature?

A significant point. Any lutenist, guitarist, violinist, etc., could have bent a note. But because they could have done it doesn't mean they *did* do it. And surely if they did in actual performance, a tablature would have appeared to indicate it. Or if not, references to the practice should be findable.

There are many instances of seemingly simple, even obvious, innovations, that have taken forever to be discovered. This is especially true in language.

Example: Large numbers of people have been saying "Whatever!" dismissively for only about 30 years. (Short for a sarcastic, "Whatever you say, idiot!") What took them so long? In theory nothing prevented George Washington or Elizabeth I from saying"Whatever!", but if lexical evidence is of any value, they clearly did not. But if in fact they did, informally, once or twice in their lives, no one would have noticed. It was not part of "the language," any more than blue notes were part of musical language before the 20th century.

Then there are blends like the gossip columnists' "Brangelina" referring to Bard Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a couple. It took the English language 1600 years to come up with that kind of a blend (abbrev. celeb name + abbrev. celeb name = name for both together). No single reason; it just did. And most potential examples of the same process still don't exist. (So far as I know, the Brits don't have an "Elizaphil" or a "Willikate" )

Of course, any clever coinage nowadays is likely to sweep the world in a way that would have been impossible two hundred years ago; but with note-bending and blues scales we're not talking about just an individual's musical eccentricity, we're talking about a widespread practice.

Stim, I can't help but be struck by Garrison's silence on bent notes, blue notes, seemingly off-key notes, odd scales, etc. It's hard to imagine why eloquent observers like her and Odum would not have drawn attention to the phenomenon if it was at all typical of the music they discussed.

Unless some new evidence turns up, one has to conclude that intentional "blue notes" were rarely used before about 1910.

Ety, what evidence we have (particularly that 1913 "'blue' note melody" suggests that it was the notes more than anything else that led to the names, "blues" being short for phrases like "blue-note compositions."