writers did not have a category for blue notes, and they just notated the songs as if they were in major modes (I realize this contradicts what I just said about "filing as minor," but I think there are different issues between notating and the lay-observers descriptions.) Or, possibly, when such songs were adopted by White sailors, the "blue note" tonality was not maintained; they became tunes in major. Another one of my posts didn't make it through the ether. To sum it up: "Minor" is more likely to entail "plaintive" than "plaintive" is to entail "minor." "Plaintive," at least as I understand it, could cover minor, modal, and (hypothetically) blusey. Guesswork: an early 19th C. writer hearing a blues scale and perceiving it as systematic rather than accidental (i.e., sung by someone with a tin ear) would have used words like "weird," "wild," or "savage" to describe it. Otherwise the words would be more like "out of tune," "off-pitch," "flat," "discordant," etc. ISTR "wild" being used in at least one description, though I suppose it could just as easily refer to timing as to tonality. How far back does the blues scale go? Did it originate in Africa before 1800? Or do we know? Mention of the singing of cotton-stowers/screwers occured in Savannah the 20s, above. Now in the 30s, we get an actual lyric. John M.'s intro: *snip* And here is another early reference, that can be dated as December 31,1838. Phillip Henry Gosse, in his LETTERS FROM