[78-L] City sounds vs. rural sounds, Delta c. 1920

[Joe Scott]

For those of us who are interested in the question of when and how much jazz and the like displaced folk music in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.
Stephen Graham visited Mound Bayou, MS, in Bolivar County, in 1919 or 1920 and wrote in his 1920 book _The Soul Of John Brown_: "I stayed there a night in a Negro hotel.... It is a musical sort of city, all a-jangle with the banjo and the brassy clamor of the gramophone. Places of amusement are many--the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-Ton cafe (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant, etc.; one sees many advertisements of minstrel shows."
Musicians who lived in Bolivar County, MS include Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, Joe McCoy, Son House, Tommy McClennan, Robert Petway, Hacksaw Harney, Sonny Boy Nelson, Honeyboy Edwards, and Howlin' Wolf.
When the Jazz Age began, Son House, Skip James, and Bill Broonzy weren't men yet and weren't guitarists yet. Contrast John Hurt, for example, who learned guitar during the first decade of the century. Hurt's material matches up extremely well with the folk material that E.C. Perrow and Howard Odum collected before 1910. It seems to have much less to do with "hillbilly" music than we sometimes see suggested -- it's just representative of the era he (and e.g. Elizabeth Cotten) learned to play, which some people seem to have imagined should have sounded more like Son House or it must be "hillbilly"-influenced. Yes, he could fill in for Shell Smith if needed, but recorded repertoirewise (apart from eventually getting into Jimmie Rodgers when he was about 35) he might as well have been Gary Davis (Narmour or no Narmour).
I used to wonder why Skip James could play stride piano. In short, because music wasn't still in some sort of 1899-on-the-farm state around the time of World War I as the blues books told us to imagine it must have been (or we couldn't appreciate Skip and Son's primal earthiness in good imaginative conscience).
If Hacksaw Harney (who tuned Delta pianos for a living) had played guitar only as quickly as Son House, would that have made him more authentic to... what? Not to 1899, when rags already existed and blues music as such apparently didn't.
Joseph Scott