Tell me about the blues: Did they originate in New Orleans?

In a recent post Ted Gioia considers the possibility that the blues originated in New Orleans. After considerable discussion:

All this is significant and enlightening, but insufficient to prove that New Orleans was the birthplace of the blues. But it does suggest that blues was a significant ingredient in its commercial music scene at a fairly early stage. My considered judgment is that New Orleans was the source of “blues-inflected jazz”—but that’s a very different claim than citing it as the home of all blues. And as all the available evidence shows, early jazz borrowed ingredients from every imaginable source—military music, spirituals, opera arias, etc. The fact that an idiom showed up in a New Orleans jazz performance is no proof that it was invented in New Orleans.

After further discussion of just how the blues wound up in New Orleans and how innovation spreads he says:

My assessment of the totality of this evidence suggests that the blues has very old roots, originating with performers who found new ways of playing African-inflected music in the New World—but typically in rural areas where they could remain immune to many of the influences linked to commercial trends in American music. The blues style eventually became urbanized in the closing years of the 19th century, and New Orleans was probably the first city where this style of music rose to prominence. It almost certainly arrived there as part of the larger migration from country to city—just as it later participated in the ensuing emigration of African-Americans from South to North. The idea that this path of dissemination went the other way around—with city musicians from New Orleans relocating to remote sharecropper plantations—is much harder to accept. That simply wasn’t the way people moved in those years.

* * * * *

This is the fourth post in my series, “Tell me about the blues.” The series is tagged with the label, tell me blues.