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Rainey’s girl in Missouri and Handy’s railroad station guitarist are examples of the original blues singers, and that the professionals were just elaborating on and jazzing up a common rural style. Certainly, Handy and Rainey were building on earlier folk forms, and gave the credit where it was due. But they also created something new, a vibrant, theatrical expansion of the older moans and hollers, and it was this new creation that swept the country under the name “blues.” They were so popular and influential that, since recordings of black rural musicians would not be made until well into the blues era, we can never have a clear idea of what the music sounded like before the professionals came on the scene. A handful of amateur folklorists in earlier years had transcribed scattered lines that seem like proto-blues lyrics, and it is possible that by the dawn of the twentieth century the deep South was full of people playing something that sounded more or less like what would come to be called blues. It is at least equally likely that such songs were rare, regional, and followed no set structures until Rainey and her peers shaped them, polished them, and made them into showstoppers.
    It is also far from clear that even these pre-blues styles were ancient, rural creations. There has always been a coterie of New Orleans patriots who claim that blues arose in that city’s red-light district. Jelly Roll Morton, who was born there in 1885, said that the style was already common in his childhood. Introducing his recording of “2:19 Blues,” he recalled that it was the signature song of a whorehouse singer named Mamie Desdumes: “She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number. Of course, to get in on it, to try to learn it, I made myself the can-rusher [the kid who would carry a bucket down to the corner bar to buy beer].” 11 This suggests that the style was already established in New Orleans almost a decade before Handy or Rainey came across it farther north. Since the city functioned as the main shipping center for the South and Midwest,and especially for river states like Mississippi and Missouri, it is possible that a New Orleans style went feral in the countryside, and Handy and Rainey would have been in just the right places to rediscover it as rural folk music. 12
    Whatever the music’s origins, by the time the first rural guitarists and singers began recording in the mid-1920s, blues had been a major pop style for over a decade, and all of them would have heard and been influenced by the polished work of the vaudeville and tent-show singers. When the record companies called their music blues, it was a commercial choice designed to link them to the popular recordings of the blues queens. The newspaper ads for their records might show an old man riding down a dirt road on a tired mule, or a wide-mouthed minstrel caricature, but to a young player trying to make a name in the entertainment world, the word conjured up pictures of good jobs, big money, and shiny cars. If someone had suggested to the major blues stars that they were old-fashioned folk musicians carrying on a culture handed down from slavery times, most would probably have been insulted.

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THE MUSIC
    I N THE END, WHAT REMAINS OF R OBERT J OHNSON IS HIS MUSIC. Whatever may be vague in his biography, and whatever unrecorded talents may have died with him, we still have two discs’ worth of songs, and they are still exciting new generations of listeners.
    And yet, even that musical legacy is sometimes hard to view with any clarity. There have been thousands of pages written about Robert Johnson’s records over the years, but the vast majority have simply been hyperbolic celebrations of his unique genius. I grew up on this writing, and agree with much of it, so I was unprepared for what happened when I taught my first series of classes on blues history. For the Mississippi class, I