Hi Guys

While I'm at it I might as well go the whole hog and challenge yet two other taboos. The name of the blues and the legend of the blues!

I have written a fictional novel called 'The Remarkable Legend of Henry Sloan!' soon to be published! In it I posit two other controversial views regarding the secret history of the blues.

Firstly, the name 'The Blues' has been accredited to Washington Irving the first great American author of such stories as 'Sleepy Hollow!' and 'Rip Van Winkle!'. Legend has it he coined the word to describe a state of depression, which then became associated with the impoverished conditions of share-croppers in te southern states. That's the story. However, how a largely illiterate population of African Americans in the South could have had any knowledge of such an obscure literary reference published in 1802 in a New York magazine confounds reason.

Secondly, I'm afraid I commit the ultimate blues heresy which is the challenge the legend of the blues itself. The legend of the Devil at the crossroads - is an interpretation of a much earlier legend or story told amongst NA peoples. It is the story of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek' - the very first Treaty negotiated between the Choctaw Nation and the Union Army and Washington.

In East Mississippi near a place called Macon, at Dancing Rabbit Creek, the elders of the Choctaw met at that place were the the four winds cross to meet with the lead of the blues (the Indians name for those that wore the Union Army Cavalry or Infantry Uniforms). There the dark figure from Washington promised the Choctaw a new and better life, in exchange for their Mississippi homelands, the land that was considered by the Choctaw to be the soul of their people. But the leader of the blues lied to the Choctaw and as a result they lost everything. This story is told to this day by the Choctaw to their children. For me it is the legend of the blues in it's original form and a legend which found a voice much later, all be it in an altered form by blues musicians!

Regards

ColmT

Last edited by ColmT; 11/30/10 09:25 PM.