Classic of Blues Literature

The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville 1899-1926, by Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff (University Press of Mississippi, 2017)

The vaudeville theater was the major public venue for blues in its earliest years, before the advent of radio, blues records, and jukeboxes. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, whose previous books chronicled the minstrel and ragtime traditions that preceded the blues, compiled The Original Blues by scouring thousands of African-American newspaper accounts to produce a volume that is indispensable to understanding blues history. Such histories most often trace the music from its rural origins as country blues, but Original Blues makes the case that key developments in the blues came from the vaudeville stage and that the vaudeville repertoire in fact strongly impacted the country blues.

2023