i'm teaching a first-year seminar on american popular musics. we're going blues, jazz, country, rock, punk, hip hop. (there are several whole genres i would have liked to add, believe me.) i am pretty deep in the standard histories. the first day, one of the students asked a pretty basic question: which came first, blues or jazz? i have been contemplating, but actually it would take a pretty long spelling out.
the short answer is that the history of these forms before publishing and, in particular, recording, is swathed in myth and will never be fully recovered. and in particular, i say the origin of the blues is up for grabs. early sources seem to hear something like it here, something else like it there: in the mississippi delta, around new orleans, in east texas, in georgia, in missouri, in arkansas. so the first thing you should do is divest yourself of the idea that any of these coud be in any way insular cultures; musicians and styles are traveling throughout the black south.
the idea that the blues originates in the mississippi delta makes it a 'folk' or peasant form, migrating to cities. this origin is far less agreed-on in the scholarship than it once was. and here is my theory, ok? it radiates from new orleans, the hub of the semi-circular blues region. in the 1890s or 1900s in nola, there may have been a sprawling group of musics known indifferently or at different moments or in different neighborhoods as 'blues' and 'jazz': i do not think these are distinct forms early on. one things the books say is that ma rainey, for example, 'hired top jazz musicians' like armstrong or oliver, but i wonder whether she or they heard themselves as playing two different genres. not, i should think.
if you were listening to the legendary originator of jazz buddy bolden, i bet it'd rest on the twelve-bar. most every jelly roll morton or king oliver recording is either a straight blues or rests on blues elements. most of them are called blues. they would be, in the early 20s, because the blues was something of a commercial fad (later superseded by 'jazz'/'swing').
no one knows what blues sounded like in the delta before performers from new orleans could have passed through, or even before people could have heard recordings of the new orleans 'jazz' bands playing the blues. obviously, we are flowing up and down america's first super-highway, and instantly it's in memphis and helena and st. louis and chicago.
really where i, like a lot of people, hear jazz exploding in my head is in the louis solos on "chimes blues" and "west end blues". one thing that makes them jazz is the virtuosity of the soloist, which is shown specifically by his ability to improvise on, play with, and potentially rip apart, the blues form. it is obvious he has known this form from the womb. this is true of that jelly roll thing too: it takes a 32-bar ragtime break in the middle of a series of blues verses. and yet the improvisation or break-out is precisely an improvisation on or from the blues: i am telling you they are not primordially distinct. but jelly roll always adds the syncretic element: the latin thing or the rag, and that eclecticism is characteristic of the unfolding history of jazz as it is not in the later history of the blues.
there is no less reason the blues should be a commercial form that went folk than that it should be a folk form that went commercial. and by 'commercial' i mean everything from storyville and parade crews to medicine and tent and riverboat shows to publishing and recording to people picking up gigs at parties or jukes, or even busking from town to town.
