WOKE up this morning, the Blues were 100 years old ...
It might seem strange to be able to put a precise date on one of our most venerable music traditions, but the centenary is said to date from the release, in March 1912, of Hart Wand's Dallas Blues, reportedly the first genuine 12-bar blues song ever published. Other songs that year featured the word "blues" in their title but weren't in authentic 12-bar blues form. Bill Wyman – blues aficionado and quondam Rolling Stone – says in his 2001 book, Blues Odyssey, that Dallas Blues was the first song with blues in its title, ahead of WC Handy's Memphis Blues and Arthur Seals's Baby Seal's Blues.
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