The blues was born in the Mississippi Delta, fathered by black men who sang and played guitars, and these men took the music to Chicago, where they and their successors turned southern folk blues into electrified urban music that black people danced to in South Side clubs and white British rock bands later built careers (and fortunes) on.
For a long time, that origin story was the prevailing popular notion about the birth of the blues. But it’s all wrong, as recent scholarship has shown. In their revelatory The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff locate the music’s origins in the early 20th century, southern black vaudeville circuit.
“By 1910,” they write, “there were racially insular black vaudeville theaters strong across the Southeast.” In these theaters, “the blues was incubated”. “Black vaudeville performers and songwriters of the era fitted up unpolished, fragmentary folk material for the professional platform. But the blues did not emerge onstage fully formed. The blues remained mutable and multiform long after it was institutionalized on the black professional stage.”
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