icans "had transformed remembered West African music into a new style called the blues" (Lomax 64). But this transformation was probably quite indirect and much of the process of developing the blues style is lost to history. Events in blues history were often transformed themselves as legends grew up around kernels of truth. One of the best-known legends is W.C. Handy's account of his first exposure to the blues. Sometime between 1892 and 1903, the composer was on tour with his orchestra when, waiting for a train in rural Mississippi, he heard a man playing slide guitar and singing "the weirdest music I had ever heard" (quoted by Davis 25). Yet when Handy, a true entrepreneur, saw a blues band showered with piles of money he soon "saw the beauty of primitive music," concluding that it "had the stuff the people wanted" (quoted by Davis 26). Handy, who later billed himself as "The Father of the Blues," went on to publish, among others, The Saint Louis Blues. This work first brought blues to an extensive audience. It was the first published work that claimed to be a blues and actually employed, at least in parts, the three-line verse with an A-A-B rhyme scheme. This twelve-bar form, which contains traces of the call and response pattern that show its African origins, was characteristic of the blues as they came to be understood by the public (Charters 19-20). In addition to this distinctive form, the blues most important feature was its use of the "bent" or "blue" notes, partially flatted notes that give the blues its unique sound (Shaw 113).
The form employed by Handy in St. Louis Blues undoubtedly reflected what he had heard in Mississippi. But Handy had heard the music in the years 1892 through 1903 and did not publish his twelve-bar blues until 1913. It was not until nine years later that the commercial recording of the music began in earnest and when producers in the early 1920s went looking for blues material and per...