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Well, the evidence for "not colored" is pretty overwhelming then. The fact that he had something listed as 'guitar solo (race)' maybe means little - James Cole & Tommie Bradley's first coupling was released under 'hillbilly' - speaking of which, the recordings on which Bayless Rose was an accompanist or as part of a group are interesting. Under the Tommie Bradley and James Cole groups in Dixon/Godrich/Rye it states that these musicians backed Clara Burston. Turn to her entry and they aren't listed (I presume this has been only half corrected from an earlier edition), - instead it has Bayless Rose, Ralph Miller and James Robinson.
The Document CD for Bradley/Cole has these Burston sides on, Parth following Dixon/Godrich I expect - but Dick Spottswood, in the notes, says the group did not include Cole/Bradley!
Same thing goes for Walter Cole - Bayless Rose, Miller & Robinson backed him, but appear on the james Cole/Tommie Bradley CD.... if anyone's still following this - why, if the Gennett ledgers have Rose & co, did Dixon/Godrich distrust them? Apparently the matrices for these sides are intermingled with Charles and Paul Johnson, white artists in the hillbilly catalogue.

Anyway, I like just about everything Bayless Rose was on, and the music sounds as much of a racial mix as his DNA - including the Walter Cole stuff

I remember an interview with Howard Armstrong in Living Blues a few years back, where he talked not about playing 'white music' for whites - but much more specific, eg Italian music for Italians (including the singing), whatever the audience demanded... I reckon it’s important to recognise the individual artist can reach beyond their culture.
Sidney Bechet's 'Jungle Drums' or 'Chant in the Night', weren't passed down through his blood, from his 'African' culture, but were in part his own impressions/expressions of his racial identity weren't they, like the first part of his autobiography? Somebody could mistakenly link Picasso's pre-cubist faces to Spanish/Iberian tradition, passed down through his Iberian ancestry... when in fact he got the influence from visits to the Louvre.

I agree that race was much more starkly drawn then, you were categorized as either black or white (or more accurately, 'pure' white, and 'other'), and the music catalogues reflected this, but someone like Bayless Rose, or Frank Hutchison just highlights how over-simplistic this was... when does music become 'blues'?... when it's 1 in 32 parts black?
Of course we have to keep sight of the restrictions that shaped the blues, but sometimes we can see past them too...