Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of ""Crazy Blues"" is commonly thought to signify the beginning of commercial attention to blues music and culture, but by that year more than 450 other blues titles had already appeared in sheet music and on recordings. In this examination of early popular blues, Peter C. Muir traces the genre's early history and the highly creative interplay between folk and popular forms, focusing especially on the roles W. C. Handy played in both blues music and the music business.

Long Lost Blues exposes for the first time the full scope and importance of early popular blues to mainstream American culture in the early twentieth century. Closely analyzing sheet music and other print sources that have previously gone unexamined, Muir revises our understanding of the evolution and sociology of blues at its inception.

|Acknowledgments ix
A Word about the Music Examples xi
Introduction 1
1. The Popular Blues Industry, 1912-1920 7
2. The Identity and Idiom of Early Popular Blues 28
3. Curing the Blues with the Blues 80
4. The Blues of W. C. Handy 104
5. The Creativity of Early Southern Published Blues 141
6. Published Proto-Blues and the Evolution of the Twelve-Bar Sequence 181
Appendix: Titular Blues, 1912-1915 217
Notes 221
Major Works Consulted 243
General Index 245
Song Index 251| Received a Certificate of Merit in the Best Music History category from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2011. — Association for Recorded Sound Collections
|An internationally recognized pianist, composer, scholar, and conductor, Peter C. Muir is the cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Music and Health in Verbank, New York.