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As Cow Cow Davenport has been cited this may, or may not, be relevant but this is what Davenport told pianist Art Hodes in 1943 and is extracted from a lengthy interview:

When I was a boy down in Alabama, the people who played music played only guitars. The guitars were carried swung on the neck with a long string, and people called them easy riders. My father didn't like that idea of his son being an easy rider so he wouldn't let me learn music. In those days the musicians had all the girls, and daddy despised it; so he didn't allow me to play in his house. He had purchased a piano, though. My mother was pianist for a church they organized. My mother admired me because I could play, and my daddy hated me because I could play. He was going to make out of me what he wanted me to be, that was a preacher. He sent me to Selma University, a Baptist college in Alabama.

At that school I could play piano like wanted to. Naturally, I'm a piano player, I get invitations to all the socials, and I would play. At that time they didn't allow them dance. But they would march up a breeze. Quite naturally with my old ragtime playing when they'd get to corners they'd kind shake themselves. So one reception we had the professor didn't allow me to play the music either. There's where the idea came for "Mama Don t low No Music Play Here. "

After I came out of school I was too large work so I wouldn't go home. Papa always said you got to work for your living. So I drifted Birmingham. That was the largest to; around my community. There I was first hired as a piano player, in a place down on 18th Street. Then I began to hear other people play. There weren’t so many competitors at that time. By me not knowing music I had to make up the stuff to play. The others would get interested in me and gang around the piano.

I left Birmingham with a carnival show. The man who got me the job, Bob Davis, was the first man who ever showed me one key to the other, A-flat to C-sharp—before that I didn't know but one key, and they called me a one-key piano player. Bob Davis needed a piano player to play the show. I could always play for myself but couldn't play for anybody else. Quite naturally with women I had to learn different keys. He'd sit down and hum the show over to me and the different keys the girls sing in. That was a great day's work for me, to learn to play in those different keys. At that time it wasn't very many people knew music so when they found another piano player that was the end of me. They didn't want to fire me because I'd been with them. But I could sing, so I got on the stage, started to sing my own songs. And I began to write songs I wanted to sing. Those conditions in the south caused me to write the "Jim Crow Blues."