What is interesting though, is that music changed very rapidly in the 20th century, perhaps more rapidly than it does now. People were very quick to move on to the next thing, and the players of the pre-war era were quickly outmoded, and needed to change to survive. Big Bill Broonzy did, but never replicated his earlier success until he returned to more traditional music in his later years as an elder statesmen to the first folk revival. Lonnie Johnson did, leaving fingerstyle behind and using a plectrum to invent the guitar’s role in jazz along with Eddie Lang, only to end up working in kitchens in his later years.

I get that, in the late 1920s, Blind Blake’s riffage emerging from a victrola was as modern as listening to the latest hits on your ipod for those experiencing it at the time. The modernity of Blake and Lemon Jefferson is apparent in the level of sophistication in their work. But still, their songs harken to the country, to simpler times, and to rhythms from the pre-recorded era. The ragtime in Blake’s music was antiquated in New Orleans by the time he was recording in the north, but gave just the right nostalgia to the music for the people it was intended for. There’s something to the cadence in Lemon’s playing that is inimitable, that comes from hearing music in a different way, unaffected by anything like the conformity of tempo and rhythm in today’s music. We would be shocked to actually hear the music of a hundred years ago, or medieval times for that matter, since it would all sound slightly off to us because our ears are formed by what we know.

Unfortunately for the blues, some of this conformity came too soon, with the shuffle rhythm becoming ubiquitous and many of the fascinating and charming variations on the 12 bar blues that Blake displays fading away or only surviving in a less raw form in the II-V changes found in jazz.

So, I do wonder if I’m projecting this, but I hear something of what Blake does in ‘Georgia Bound’ that has me thinking he’s trying to playful give some hints of earlier cadences he had absorbed, while at the same time sprinkling in some of the most modernistic riffs he ever played. I don’t know where there is a genealogy of sorts of Blake’s repertoire, but I don’t personally know of another of his tunes that puts it together in quite this way.

As to his songwriting, it seems he is really a musician who had it all, so to speak, the playing, the writing, the singing–as does Stevie Wonder–and like Stevie, didn’t really go for the gut-busting, in-your-face vocal all the time, but finessed things. His lyrics might evoke some of the classic blues tropes, but there’s not much of the repeating standard lines from the tradition (in fact, many younger blues players based songs on Blake’s.) When I say there’s a modern aspect, I’m saying, that unlike his playing–which was both rich in tradition and pushing the envelope at the time he was recording, Blake’s lyric writing was ahead of his time. One of the contributions of the early bluesmen was the concept of the singer-songwriter, though it was not called that, but to be a bluesman meant to have original material. Meanwhile, in the mainstream, and even in the more dignified ‘classic blues,’ professional songwriters wrote the songs for singer’s to sing. However for most bluesmen, singing the blues often meant free-standing lyrics around a loosely defined theme–a string of (possibly very evocative) non-sequiters. Blake’s songs open with a premise and build upon that premise to a conclusion. This is the essence of modern ‘artistic’ songwriting of a kind that did not really occur in the decades between the 30s and the 60s when the Beatles and Dylan, students of the bluesmen, followed their lead and broke with ‘Tin-Pan Alley,’ record label approved lyrics. Blake and blues singers in general defined singing of personal emotions in an unvarnished way, and Blake does an exceptional job of writing at a professional level. All of this in an under-recognized, in fact at the time, barely tolerated medium.

But of course both men recorded in the 1920s, and while that seems long long ago to some of us, it was really no greater difference in time (45 years) than for a kid that listens to the Beatles today. And the Beatles weren’t THAT long ago….

So I think there is a tendency to see the pre-war bluesmen and women as coming from an older time than in fact they were. As a nation state America really has no ancient history, but perhaps we have a need to imagine one. Coupled with the tremendous progress in audio recording and photography that occurred during the 1920s and afterward, it gives me the impression of looking at Blind Blake and Blind Lemon through a long reversed telescope, where with every year that I get closer to 1920, time stretches to fill decades and even centuries.

I find it interesting that you focus on Blake’s songwriting, which has always received less attention than his magnificent guitar playing. But I’m confused when you describe his songwriting as modern in subject matter and style, and I’m not sure what you mean. Blake WAS modern, so why shouldn’t he sound modern? In addition I don’t really see the relationship to topical material a la Woody Guthrie. Blake’s lyrics, to me, sound pretty representative of other blues artists of the period. In the case of Georgia Bound, we should ask ourselves also whether he was purely writing lyrics that pleased him, whether he was writing something that he thought would be popular, or whether he had received direction from the recording company to write a song about nostalgia for southern life. It’s hard to know.

And while Georgia Bound’s accompaniment is less jazzy or syncopated than some of his other material, this doesn’t necessarily mean he is playing the simple Piedmont Blues of his youth. Maybe Georgia Bound’s accompaniment is just as modern as his other material, but with a slightly different aesthetic.