In his new book The Blues, musician Chris Thomas King asserts that the “blues was invented in the 1890s by Black Creoles in New Orleans.” That’s an extraordinary claim, although not entirely unwarranted, as we shall see below.
King’s confident proclamation puts him in conflict with a host of other experts, each with a pet theory about the origins of the blues. Almost every regional blues style in the US has fervent advocates. And there are other possible sources for the genre outside the Americas.
I’ve written elsewhere about the pride of Texas blues advocates, who have offered strong arguments for the primacy of their tradition. I’ve also written a book about Mississippi blues, and though I’ve never claimed it was the birthplace for the idiom, I’m convinced that the blues was played at Stovall plantation in the Delta at least two generations before Muddy Waters made his first recording there in 1941. New York also has a key role to play here, if only because so many early hit blues recordings were made there—but my view (outlined in more detail below) is that blues flourished in rural areas long before it came to the major American cities.
Finally, we need to take seriously the claims that blues originated in Africa—as many have asserted. Samuel Charters traveled to West Africa fifty years ago to find these roots of the blues, and eventually abandoned the hypothesis. He reached the conclusion that African ingredients evolved into the blues, but this happened in the New World—hence blues is genuinely African-American rather than purely African.
I find his argument plausible, but I was shaken in my views by a snippet of a 1906 recording from Africa, uncovered by Dr. Lewis Porter, which clearly incorporates blues phraseology. It’s hard to judge from one track, which could be a random moment, but it’s a significant fact. Porter tells me that he continues to research this matter, noting that he has now listened to “over 200 recordings of African music made in the early 1900s” and surmises that the blues phrasing on the cited example may have been atypical and perhaps even unique. And, he adds, there’s a genuine possibility that the recording from 1906 "could have been influenced by African-American music, even at that early date." He will have more to share about this intriguing subject in the future.
And there are other theories about the blues, linking its origins to a whole host of other precedents: the Islamic call to prayer, vaudeville acts, Native American traditions, etc. Every one of the hypotheses has some evidence to support it, although not every case is equally convincing.