Between 1890 and 1910 new sounds – melodic, instrumental, and verbal – began to penetrate the repertoire of African American music hitherto dominated by spirituals, functional songs of work and play, narrative folk ballads, banjo tunes, and fast-paced instrumental dance music. Drawing from all these older forms, as well as the simultaneously emerging ragtime and jazz, these sounds coalesced fully by the end of this period to the point where they could be recognized as a distinct genre of music called the blues. This new music conveyed a remarkable sense of immediacy, purporting to express the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the singer as well as the spontaneous inventions and variations of musicians at the moment of performance. Yet for all of its immediacy, blues as a whole had a power of endurance that would sustain it throughout the twentieth century and see it at the end of that century as a major form of popular music with worldwide appeal.

Contemporary reports and later recollections of blues during this early period place the music in rural areas, small towns, and cities throughout the South, especially the “Deep South” from east Texas to central Georgia and the Carolina Piedmont region, the land where cotton was king. Blues appear to have been rarer or non-existent along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and in older settled regions such as Virginia or areas such as the Appalachian Mountains where the population was overwhelmingly white. From the Deep South blues flowed along arteries of commerce and transportation, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and the various railroad lines stretching northward and westward.