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Originally Posted by JonPR
But can you point to an earlier version of the House Carpenter where the musician(s) were treating it like a blues, and not like a traditional folk song (American or English)? That would definitely weaken my argument!
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No but I do know that there's a lot of assumptions made about the kind of music that black folks played , like it was all blues and jazz .I mean there were bands of black musicians playing Irish dance music professionally and there was a lot of crossover going on that was part of the history of American folk music.
I think you would need to have access to Kelly Jo Phelps record collection to know his influences. White Appalachian musicians picked up the blues style from those they worked with and in the Southern States there were white share croppers picking cotton alongside African Americans.
Jazz tap dancing led on to break dancing and that competitive approach to dancing where protagonists are judged by a crowd of onlookers originated when black people watched Irish immigrants and European sailors dancing Hornpipes in impromptu competitions, that's the level of cross influence between cultures that was going on in America .
Your default assumption is that Kelly Jo Phelps blues arrangement popped into his head out of no where. I just don't think that's the most likely scenario. I think it's more likely that he was influenced by hearing American folk songs being sung and accompanied by non white musicians or white musicians who had themselves been influenced by black musicians .
It's not necessary that he had to hear a blues slide arrangement of that particular song and copy it to be influenced by a pre-existing stylistic tradition.
Obviously he wasn't influenced by English folk music at all.