Blind Lemon Jefferson worked the corners in Deep Ellum, Dallas, singing over the street noise with a guitar doing half the talking. That's where the shape of it got made, I think — no band behind him, nobody counting him in, so a line could run long if he felt like running it long, and the guitar would come in underneath and answer him back. Line for line. Call, then the answer, out of the same pair of hands.
He went up to Chicago in the twenties and cut it to wax more or less the way he'd been doing it on the street, bars falling where the words fell. Listen for the places the meter just stretches and nobody stops him. Born in 1893, out near Coutchman, and gone by 1929, which is no time at all for the number of sides he left.
Paramount pressed those sides at a chair factory in Grafton, Wisconsin — furniture plant with a record operation bolted on. That's a fair bit of the hiss you hear under him, Otis.
Otis, those sides outlived the distance he could walk — people were still singing See That My Grave Is Kept Clean decades on, and Lead Belly, who they say led him round Dallas in the early days, carried the songs into rooms Lemon never played.