The Blues Before And After: Blues Becomes Popular Earlier

No one really knows when the blues first started, although it's generally agreed that they had their origins in the gospel and African music of ex-slaves and their descendents in the late nineteenth century. Early blues performers like W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton claim to have first heard them in the very early 1900s, so the blues as they are most commonly known were around by then, although recordings (of the harmonica and guitar variety) didn't really appear to start until the 1920s.

But WI blues music had found a following among white audiences at the same time they were emerging in the black community? Who could have popularized the classic blues sound a la an Elvis Presley at the turn of the century-and maybe jump-started rock and roll fifty or even sixty years earlier?
 
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