[18] See Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 24; also The Negro and His Songs.
When a blues record is issued it quickly becomes the property of a million Negro workers and adventurers who never bought it and perhaps never heard it played. Sometimes they do not even know that the song is from a record. They may recognize in it parts of songs long familiar to them and think that it is just another piece which some songster has put together. Their desire to invent a different version, their skill at adapting stanzas of old favorites to the new music, and sometimes their misunderstanding of the words of the new song, result in the transformation of the song into many local variants. In other words, the folk creative process operates upon a song, the origin of which may already be mixed, and produces in turn variations that may later become the bases of other formal blues. A thorough exposition of this process would take us far beyond the limits of this volume, but the following instances are cited to illustrate generally the interplay between the folk blues and the formal blues.
Here is a specimen captured from a Negro girl in Georgia who had just returned from a trip to “Troit,” Michigan.
When you see me comin’
Throw yo’ woman out de do’,
For you know I’s no stranger,
For I’s been dere once befo’.
He wrote me a letter,
Nothin’ in it but a note.
I set down an’ writ him,