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Scott Joplin publishes "Maple Leaf Rag." Ragtime will become a key influence on the Piedmont style of blues.
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Victor Records issues the first known recording of Black music, "Camp Meeting Shouts."
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The musician W.C. Handy sees a bluesman playing guitar with a knife at a train station in Mississippi.
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The first blues songs, including W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", are published as sheet music.
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Mamie Smith records for Okeh Records. Her "Crazy Blues" becomes the first blues hit, beginning the business of "race" recording.
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Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, the defining performers of the classic blues, make their recording debuts.
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Ralph Peer, the famous Artist & Repertory man for Okeh and Victor Records, makes his first field recordings in Atlanta, Georgia, marking the recording debut of both the folk blues and what will later be called country music.
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The first male folk blues records, featuring singers Papa Charlie Jackson and Daddy Stovepipe, are issued.
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Electrical recording technology is introduced.
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The early Delta bluesman Charley Patton is first recorded.
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Legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson begins his short recording career.
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Eddie Durham records the first music featuring the electric guitar. The modern instrument, first developed by musician George Beauchamp and engineer Adolph Rickenbacher in the early 1930s, will help to transform the sound of the blues.
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Alan Lomax records McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, for the Library of Congress at Stovall's Farm in Mississippi.
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Bluesman T-Bone Walker plays electric guitar on the recording of his standard "Call it Stormy Monday."
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Jerry Wexler, an editor at Billboard magazine, substitutes the term "rhythm and blues" for the older "race" records.
