It does sound like an exercise in creative memory by Macca − which of course makes you wonder what else might be wishful thinking.

I do love those Robert Johnson records, though without putting him on a pedestal above House or plenty of others who recorded around the same time. I think what attracts people is that he sounds so darned authentic, though this is true of others too. One train I’ve never been able to get on is Clapton’s take on it all. Musically speaking, I mean. If you hear him talk you can’t doubt the effect this stuff had on him, but when you hear say the ‘Crossroads’ on that podcast, to me it seem a million miles away from the same spirit. This isn’t at all a “white guys should leave that stuff alone” thing – I love the covers vintage-period Stones did of some of those records, and to my ear they have their own authenticity. But House, yep, ‘Death letter blues’ and all that – absolutely hair-raising stuff.

There’s a whole book on blues within my book, incidentally – my painstaking attempt to get to the bottom of what part (if any) they played in the origins of jazz. Before doing the book I never really got why what’s called ‘classic blues’ − Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and all that − was piano-based, given my assumption that blues was a rough rural (Delta) folk music. What I discovered was that – whatever WC Handy heard some guy playing with a knife on guitar strings on a railway station in Evansville, Indiana in the early 1890s – the blues that preceded the classic blues (which in a sense was a recording company creation with whites partly in mind) not only didn’t emanate from the Mississippi Delta but was really nothing like House’s blues, or Johnson’s, or Charley Patton’s, though it was also recorded in the 20s, by people like Rufus Thomas and (those early Okeh recordings) Mississippi John Hurt. I became totally addicted to this stuff when I discovered it, and there is a lot of it (https://tinyurl.com/y93x9nrs).

So before piano was king, guitar and to a lesser extent banjo were. Originally – or at least soon after it was formulated – blues tended not to be the province of tormented figures singing the pain of their lives, but just one item in the repertoires of banjo- and guitar-picking singers of the songster tradition. This tradition too sort of persisted alongside everything else that was going on, in the person of Mississippi John, for example, and also Furry Lewis (born within a year of each other – 1892/3 – and the last generation of this type). Leadbelly too, five years older, in his own way. One of my favourite things on YouTube is this Furry video, which ends with Leon Russell accompanying him in new rather than old blues style: https://tinyurl.com/ycxaoate

Found that Etienne Mbappe interview on talking2musicians.com and steemitKR and listening to it now. Will also be checking out that Bela Fleck banjo doc you reference. That story, and the whole business of African retention, are also things I do my best to probe in the book.

I sense we have much in common. Any gathering of more than three or four people is something I try to avoid, in favour of steemit meetups as I am in principle (I’d be interested to know if there are Steemians where I live), in real life I’d run a mile rather than find myself at one. :o) So it’ll have to be the written word.

LATER ... That's a lovely interview - Etienne sounds like a great guy.