For instance—the blues is Southern, its roots are there, and the deeper South you go, the deeper the blues. In many respects, this holds up, no matter how much you listen and no matter how much research you do. But it’s no less true that an awful lot of important moments in that early world of blues formation happened in a much less romantic place, in Midwestern or “mid-Southern” river towns. Sylvester Weaver, the first black performer to record a country blues song? A Louisville man, and recorded there. Mamie Smith, the first black woman to record a blues? A Cincinnati girl. Although she liked to tell people she was from Georgia (for blacks in the entertainment world, being as Southern as possible already had what they call “political economy”). One could go on, could build a grand case for the middle of the country, and in the end, the blues would go on being quintessentially of the South. But the minority report is fascinating. And it begins with the fact that one of the very earliest claims for a “first blues”—the first little lightbulb to flicker on if we’re looking down at the map of musical polygenesis—happens not in Mississippi or New Orleans or even Texas but along our section of the Ohio.
The story comes from John Jacob Niles, the Louisville-born composer and singer, and collector of early ballads. My grandparents came to know him, because he often performed at Christ Church Episcopal in Lexington, where they attended and where my great-great-grandfather had been the bishop. Even my mother remembers Niles some. I never saw him, though he lived until 1980. She remembers being told to sit still and listen to his music. He played a giant Appalachian dulcimer and sang in a high, warbly, eerie voice. “I Wonder as I Wander” was a favorite. His song “Go Away from My Window” gave Dylan the opening for “It Ain’t Me Babe.”
In 1930, in an essay for Musical Quarterly about “coon shouting” (as they called blues singing before they had the word), Niles wrote about the first blues song he remembered ever hearing: “The first shouter I ever knew was a Negress. That was in 1898. She did the current ragtime things, but was most effective in the native blues. Her name was Ophelia Simpson, although to me she was ‘Black Alfalfa,’ shouter and moaner in Dr. Parker’s Medicine Show.”