Henry Thomas

Texas songster Henry Thomas remains a relative stranger who made some great recordings, then returned to obscurity. Evidence suggests he was an itinerant street musician, a musical hobo who rode the rails across Texas and possibly to the World's Fairs in St. Louis and Chicago just before and after the turn of the 19th century. Most agree he was the oldest African-American folk artist to produce a significant body of recordings. His projected 1874 birth date would pre-date Charley Patton by a good 17 years. Like Patton and a handful of other musicians generally termed songsters...