Thanks!

“Single major chord throughout or absence of IV or use of I-V-I-I at the end shouldn't be concerns anyway as these were all found in folk blues.” Sure. I should have made clearer that I don’t believe such a progression prevents it per se from being a blues.

And when added to “Long distance phone” + 16-bar/AAAB + Call-and-response pattern + Rather “folk blues oriented” first four bars, I agree that we have more than is usually required to call a song a blues.

What puzzles me with the “single major chord throughout” thing – I may be getting ahead of myself here, it would require a serious listening session – is the following: it seems to me that most of the time, early “single major chord throughout” blues songs could be set to roughly “I I I I IV IV I I (IV IV I I) V V I I,” so much so that one often hears the latter progression, when listening to a “single major chord throughout,” although said progression is obviously not there. Here, it is impossible. Which would make it a bit unusual, I guess, in this regard.

“his relative inability to remember”: if Kennedy, and his four informants, are wrong about what the melody (usually / roughly) was – about the “spirit” of the melody, let’s say – or if Kennedy chose to alter it for any reason, then, yes, my points don’t hold.

But I tend to believe that if he took the pain to write these accidentals, these multiple b7’s and b5, where 6’s and a 5 would have been just fine, saying, “I arrived to a version very close to the original,” then these specific notes must have been there for a reason.

If indeed, what is printed in Mellows is close to what Kennedy used to hear by 1904, among the elements that I find unusual melodically for an early folk blues, in addition to the aforementioned “lines starting with b7” and “presence of b5,” which, again, make the melody quite modern and very “modal,” I would say, I forgot to mention “total absence of b3.”

Is all of this enough to raise a doubt that Kennedy and/or his informants may actually have heard this chorus harmonized (a guitar or piano player, a barbershop configuration etc), once or more, in the very non-blues way given by Kennedy (where b5 is perfectly consonant)? Or that the melody here printed is the mix of slightly distinct melodies some of which would have pushed the song further toward Kennedy’s harmonic progression? Rather than Kennedy not “understand[ing] the song authentically"? Probably not.

Again, I agree that the case that this is a blues is very strong. And my (slight) reluctance is more a “listening feeling” than really strongly rational.

Which is why I “confessed” it.