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It's hard for me to imagine a place without the Delta Blues and other blues genres. From ca. 1970 to the early 90's, my wife's brother collected every significant blues recording he could get his hands on. He put 10 thousand songs on tape, stretching from around 1923 through the 60's or 70's.
For most of those years he was a seller of rare 45's and 78's from his house in Akron OH, until he moved to Arizona and married a Navajo woman, and raised three kids on the reservation there. We have a large box of cassette transfers from his reel-to-reel tapes, which I'd like to see in the hands of someone who would digitize at least some of them, someday.
I see the old blues as just another music genre, so when I take the time to "get my head into it", I enjoy it immensely. One caution is good to have when exploring this music, and that is that like most any music genre, the vast majority of what you'll dig up isn't noteworthy, or listen-worthy. If you put together a collection of the better material - what you think would survive in your collection for a long time, you'll have a treasure-house of unique listening on hand.
Reading through some of the blues books like the History of the Blues, you learn about the violence and tragedy that affected many of these players, and in an odd coincidence of history, even given the different circumstances of our past three decades, a similar violence and tragedy is chasing today's leading artists in hip-hop and related genres. Something tells me that we shouldn't forget the lessons of history, and we should make sure to have a place reserved in our music collections for the Folk Blues, Delta Blues, and what followed them.