Like the proverbial broken record, I continue to plug Alan Lomax's wonderful "The Land Where the Blues Began"--which tells more about the blues, and better, than anything else around.

You should read as many different views as you can before coming to conclusions, because there are more questions than answers about the origins and history of the blues -- but, even some of the fairly widely read authors are on shakey ground sometimes--

Also, a lot of writers tended to take everything they were told at face value, failing to appreciate that many of the bluesmen were as good at telling stories as they were at playing music--