The history of the blues is one of consistent self-consciousness; in other words, the prevailing notion (principally among white scholars and enthusiasts) that the blues were born entirely out of circumstance fails to give credit where credit is due. Blues artists are just that—artists. And artists, despite the fiction which says that blues music is stable, orally communicated, and bound to region, can owe inspiration to musical and socioeconomic conditions even while also independently creating, driven both by their own imagination and by the profit which in America an imagination can produce. This section, on history, will or at least should show two things, the first of which is that there is an inexact public conception of what the blues are and how the blues developed. This conception, namely, is that blues is roots music only, born in one specific sound and region and most notable only as the basis for later, more complex music. The history, secondly, shows that such is an imagining of real facts: that blues musicians have profitably pushed their own music to new borders, in and of itself.
The first blues music, to this end, was made not by men in fields, singing traditional songs—but rather by women endowed with all the glitz and glamour (however false, given their racial setting) of the vaudeville stage. Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey were all more popular and more powerful in the 1920s, when the term “blues” was first being used, than were their male and rural counterparts. Some historians, however, tend only to think of field labor, prison camps, and paternalism alongside blues verse, even though all three come up much more often in country-and-western lyrics, and far less often in the blues than sexual innuendo. The real history here proves that blues was, from the very first, music made for performance and profit, not solely for local consumption and later appropriation by "better" white performers. Calling only music made locally, indigenously, and non-profitably “authentic”—or, in other words, listening nostalgically to music from 1930s Mississippi (not quite nostalgic for black people)—is the privilege of white projection. And, again, projection of this sort ignores the creative control blues masters do have over their music.
The stock market crash in 1929—an anomalous end to what had been an era of showy, swanky blues—mired the music consuming public in an abject poverty. Record labels and music producers too faced the grim burdens of the new decade, which helps explain why omnipresent female vaudeville stars were soon replaced at the “race” labels by male, transcendentalist country blues soloists such as Son House. Bessie Smith had once been an example of black success (bedecked in gold sequins and an opera gown, her onstage presence is perhaps the very reason why her blues is not considered “authentic”). But now, the shows that had been most popular with both black and white audiences had become too expensive and racially ostentatious to remain practicable. The labels could not afford salaries, songwriters, bands, or the stage renting fees charged by the Theatre Owners Booking Association. The apparent solution, since demand for race music was and would remain high, was to find race music for cheap in Mississippi, and so began the process of change by which the blues became known as the music of male guitarists.
