The New York Times produces an interesting piece on the blues, and especially Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson left 29 songs and little else, but it was enough. Johnson has long since become the most famous blues singer of all time, reaching a level in the pantheon of American music occupied by figures like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. The myths inevitably grew up around him. Most writers who have dealt with him have found it impossible to resist the story of his deal with the devil, or the image of him pursued by “hellhounds.”

But as Johnson’s popularity has grown — the box set of his “Complete Recordings” (Columbia/Legacy) has sold nearly two million copies worldwide — a growing number of music scholars have begun to question Johnson’s place in the canon, and the received wisdom about blues history itself.

Elijah Wald’s new “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues” (Amistad/HarperCollins) is one of the most contentious yet, daring to suggest that Johnson’s primacy was largely a creation of white fans and music critics of the 1960’s.“As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure,” Mr. Wald writes, “and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.”

With extensive research into the listening habits of the audience of the time, Mr. Wald describes a history of the blues that is markedly different from the one in accounts like Martin Scorsese’s recent seven-part PBS series, “The Blues.”

In Mr. Wald’s history, the principal players are not lonesome folk singers from dusty hamlets, but seasoned professionals riding the latest trends in black pop. They have names that are largely unknown today except among experts: Peetie Wheatstraw, Leroy Carr and Kokomo Arnold. And most of them were women. The kings of the blues were actually the queens of the blues: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and dozens of others now all but forgotten, singers like Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and Sara Martin.

Johnson, who died in 1938, emerges in Mr. Wald’s account as a regional player eager to copy the latest hits. And he was only marginally successful. Just 11 of his songs were issued in his lifetime — the biggest stars recorded well over 100 songs, Mr. Wald points out — and his biggest hit, “Terraplane Blues,” sold about 5,000 copies.

Mr. Wald and other critics argue that the discrepancy between Johnson’s stature and his accomplishments stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of blues music by later, mostly white, writers

Since I’m a huge blues nut (favs: Johnny Lee Hooker and Sippie Wallace), I find this fascinating. The point is that white blues fans, over time, have processed false images of what bluesmen are, how they came about, and perhaps it’s mere self-delusion when blues fans create these images of fantasy about “tribal, backwoods” bluesmen. And especially, he seems to think that white blues fans had different standards, and therefore, re-wrote the history of blues music. However, Mr. Wald doesn’t stress enough how blacks themselves helped to promulgate these historical inaccuracies, in order to bring glory to a largely black music format.

Indeed, the Robert Johnson myth is larger than life, and I’m glad to hear a music expert say so. Due to such mythology, blues Queens like Bessie Smith, and surely, Sippie Wallace, have been ignored.

The obsession with Johnson at the expense of almost all other blues singers, Mr. Wald suggests, has grossly distorted the history of the blues. Prewar blues musicians were much more versatile and pop oriented than is widely known; Mr. Wald notes that when Alan Lomax interviewed Muddy Waters in Mississippi in the early 1940’s, he found that Waters’s repertory included “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and seven Gene Autry songs — more pop than blues. And the immediate origins of the blues, Mr. Wald writes, are most likely in black vaudeville, not in field hollers. The blues, in other words, was up-to-the-minute pop, a sign of urbanization, technology and sophistication, not primitivism or tradition.

Mr. Wald has a looser definition. Blues music, as he sees it, is simply part of a continuum of black pop. Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie Smith were not moaning field laborers. “They were Sam Cooke, they were Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin,” he said. “That’s what we’ve forgotten, and that’s what a lot of white blues fans don’t want them to be.”