The Music of the Blues: The Early Days

Some of the earliest reports we have of music resembling the blues comes from academic scholars. While on a dig in rural Mississippi in 1902, the archaeologist Charles Peabody reported hearing his hired black workers sing impromptu songs that were undoubtedly a blues or blues derivative. A folklorist named Gates Thomas heard what he called the blues in southern Texas and John Jacob Niles, another folklorist, met a white guitarist in Kentucky who sang traditional mountain lyric songs in three-line blues stanzas, both around the same time as Peabody.

But it was the famous folklorist Howard Odum who gave the strongest evidence of early blues. Odum collected the verses to a large number of black folk songs in Lafayette County, Mississippi between 1905 and 1908, many of the lyrics of which later turned up in blues songs. He reported these songs were performed on a wide variety of occasions, ranging from social dances to a solitary man sitting on a porch.

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