No one can say precisely where the blues first came into being, but the evidence suggests strongly that it was somewhere in the vast area stretching from inland Georgia, crossing the intricate swampy forests of the Louisiana until the huge Texas. With the exception of the French and Spanish settled cities of the Gulf Coast and French-speaking southwest Louisiana, most of this territory was inhabited by Indians or was uninhabited until the first half of the nineteenth century. Cotton was king in this region and a large number of black workers toiled in the fields to plant, cultivate, and harvest it, first as slaves and later as sharecroppers and sometimes renters and owners of the land. In some of the plantation areas where cultivation was most intense, such as the Mississipi Delta and The Black Belt of Alabama, the black population could reach as high as 80 or 90 percent of the total. Most of the blues innovators who carried forward the music’s stylistic development lived in this area or started their musical careers here. Later recollections by musicians and other observers, in fact, place the blues in cities like New Orleans, St. Louis and Shreveport before the turn of the 20th century, but the music probably having been broght there by migrants from the nearby countryside. In 1901 and 1902 Charles Peabody, excavating an archaeological site near the Delta community of Stovall, noted that his black workers often sang improvised songs to guitar accompaniment about everyday life, love, hard luck, and good times. These songs were performed after work or after church for dances and other social gatherings, for courtship, or even by a lonely singer sitting on his doorstep or by his fireside. The early Blues men are consistenly described as young, in contrast to those who sang the older songs of the slavery period. This new music is associated with the class of displaced migratory workers seeking cash work in the levee camps and lumber camps, or coal, working on the Mississipi River boats, or seeking work in the towns and cities. Others associated the blues with pimps and gamblers, and still others found them among those who had run afoul of the law and landed in jail. The ideal of the blues singer was to be free to move about, riding in style when times were good and hoboing when times were tough, hiring himself out to the highest bidder for his manual labor or musical service or hustling up a living by his own wits and charm, generally living as well as he could and leaving whenever he became dissatisfied or restless. He avoided being tied to the land, either as an owner or through a long-term sharecropping arrangement, as this meant the loss of mobility and acceptance of the social tatus quo. He preferred to sing and play for tips on street corners and in parks, on passenger trains and riverboat, and at railroad stations, pool halls, bars, cafés, brothels, house parties, dances, and travelling shows. It was a dangerous life, but potentially a rewarding one and certainly always interesting. Center of this kind of life on the road were the “big” city like Memphis, Jackson, Greenville, Clarksdale, Houston, Dallas, Shreveport: in this context the musicians could learn from one another other, therefore synthetizing many musical ideas and developing they own style. Although the best blues artists possessed instantly recognizable personal styles, there was a certain degree of overall stylistic unity to the early recorded blues by artists from the Deep South and Texas: probably the most striking feature of this music is its overall sense of intensity, urgency, seriousness, sincerity and conviction. The The performers give the impression of being at one with their music. They are not merely instruments who present a song. When one hears the song, one hears the performer. This is particularly the case in the Deep South. Here the Blues often seems stripped to the bare essentials. There is little filler, little ornamentation, little wasted space. Every note is meant to be felt. The singing tends to be impassioned, with the voice coming from the back of the singer’s throat and having a harsh, raspy quality. The early observers tell us mostly about the music’s social context and print samples of the song lyrics. They say little about specific blues singers, preferring to treat them all rather anonymously as members of a homogeneous social class. It is only in the era of commercial recordings of this music that we begin to distinguish one artist from another in terms of musical career and musical style. It was the 1926 recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, a true southern folk bluesman from Texas, that opened the floodgates for the recordings of down-home blues. In the next six years, perhaps as many as two hundred solo artists and small groups made commercial records of this type of music. What we know of the early Blues were filtered through the tastes and decisions of men like Frank Walker, director of the commercial choices of Columbia Records. Various factors contributed during that period to promote the recordings of this kind of music: first of all, the invention of the electrical recording process, which made guitar easier to record, afforded the listener a wider acoustic range and less surface noise, and made it somewhat easier to distinguish clearly the words of singers with regional accents and slurred diction. Secondly, the greater labels were available to invest in campaigns of discovery of talents, launching field trips to discover and record regional talents and setting up temporay studios in the greatest cities of the South as Memphis, Nashville, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, Shreveport, Saint Antonio, Richmond, Jackson etc. etc. Thirdly, the growing success of the radio represented one enormous effectiveness instrument of dissemination. The extensive recording activity and field sessions lasted until 1932, by which time all of the major record companies had gone into bankruptcy as a result of the Depression that invested the United States economy in those years; but the Blues continued its dissemination, therefore as it was born, that’s to say, through its on the road life.