No one person created the blues. It was a sound born from slaves on plantations, shaped in prison chain gangs, and turned into a new style of music on the back porches of poor, African-American homes in the late 1800s.

In the 1930s, folklorists John, Alan, and Ruby Lomax traveled the South in the search of the birthplace of blues. Sure enough, they found it in the poorest parts of the region: in prisons, in hovels, and in the homes of former slaves.

The people whose music the Lomaxes photographed and recorded during their travels were nameless, poor folk without a penny to call to their own – but some of the recordings they made would change history.

[Read the full article at All That Is Interesting.]