Lack of awareness of musical roots adversely affects the quality of popular music today, said Tonya Browne, lead singer for local blues outfit Queen Bee and the Blue Hornet Band. Popularizing pure blues in order to inform people about it in a historical sense might be a positive thing, Browne said, but for the most part, some music fans just aren't passionate enough to be interested. There's some people that just aren't into music. Another aspect of the blues that has been overshadowed by tangents and misconceptions is the fact that it is rooted in African American culture. It's an African American thing.
White guys can only approximate it.
In the 1930s, most black blues singers in the Mississippi Delta were unable to record much material because many record companies had policies against working with black artists. In addition, the commercial success enjoyed by Elvis Presley can be attributed to the quality of the songs he covered from black blues artists who were not able to get their own recording and promotion contracts in the '50s. Z.Z. Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn are playing music that, although it sounds blues-y, is blues more in label than in purity. Because of a preponderance of white blues artists today, people might assume that it was always that way. That is not the case.