Recently, I've been fascinated with early recordings of American Blues artists. I would love to know more about what their lives were like, what they thought of their music, who they were as people, who their fans were, what a concert would look like, etc. I would say I'm much more interested in the period between the very start of blues and, say, 1940, than its development afterwards. Lead Belly is my jam right now and I was fascinated reading his wiki articlr. Would love to learn more!
I would prefer the writing to be accessible to the average layperson. Fun facts, fluff, etc. are very welcome.
Artist, album, and song recommendations are also welcome. I'm new to blues and want to dive in.
You've asked a very broad question!
Blues scholarship is filled with mythmaking and hack romanticism; things have improved significantly but spooky tales about crossroads and the notion of apparent hidden meanings in plainly literal songs persist. Most of these stories were borne out of white fantasies about blackness, fantasies that really ramped up in the fifties and sixties folk revival, where well-meaning middle-class whites in America and the United Kingdom "revived" folk and blues music and turned it into something it never really was.
As recommended by /u/hillsonghoods, Elijah Wald's book Escaping the Delta is good, and cuts through a lot of myths - almost to a fault. Stephen Calt's biography of Skip James, I'd Rather Be the Devil, is written in much the same vein, breaking down fairy stories and really presenting James closer to how he actually was, and the picture he paints isn't pretty.
As for blues music, there is so so much to recommend.
Pre-war blues: a very broad category. It's good to take a look at Document Records, a record label that I believe is run entirely by two Scotsmen.
Document has collaborated with Jack White's Third Man Records on a few projects, namely vinyl re-releases of the entire recorded oeuvre of Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell and the Mississippi Sheiks. These are very good compilations and well worth listening to.
But, besides their collaborations with Jack White, Document are known for having the rights to the music of an absurd amount of pivotal and curious blues figures. Piano blues, ragtime, delta blues, Piedmont blues, the list just goes on. Once you've digested Robert Johnson's discography, move on to this stuff. They have all their records on Spotify I believe; dig through their website and just pick out stuff that catches your eye. The "rare country blues" compilation albums they have are great for sampling interesting sounds.
Electric blues: key players here are Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker. Of course, this is a very small list, and does not cover anywhere near the amount of people it should. Chess records in Chicago and Sun records in Memphis are two pivotal labels in the development of electric blues; follow them up.
Firstly, note that Leadbelly isn't exactly a blues artist; categories weren't as fixed in those days, but he was presented more as a folk artist, and had a variety of songs that fit more into the folk category, or as worksongs, rather than the blues per se; so you might find recordings by blues artists aren't quite as much to your taste (or might be more to your taste).
A good book I've read about the blues recently is Delta Blues by Ted Gioia, which (I thought) struck a sensible balance between revisionist and traditionalist tendencies in people who write about the blues. Elijah Wald's Escaping The Delta is a fair bit more colourful than Gioia, but Wald's all about puncturing the myth, and I suspect that the myth might be part of the attraction for you.
In terms of pre-1940s blues, at that time period, you're almost entirely looking at pre-electric blues. The obvious one is Robert Johnson, primarily because the sound quality of his recordings is the highest of any of the delta blues guys (as he was recording in the mid-to-late 1930s, rather the late 1920s, when many of the delta blues guys recorded). The recent Sony compilation CD Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection has the best sound quality I've yet heard.
Other artists of the era who sound interesting to modern ears (well, mine at least) include Sonny Boy Williamson I, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White.
If you find you like Leadbelly much better than the blues stuff here, I'd recommend trying out the Smithsonian's box set Anthology Of American Folk Music, a famous box set released in the late 1950s which was released on CD in the 1990s, which is full of early folk music recorded in the 1930s.
Artist, album, and song recommendations are also welcome. I'm new to blues and want to dive in.
Muddy Waters, Howling wolf, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon and I assume you've listened to Robert Johnson already because he's basically the grandfather of blues(recorded blues at least).
I wouldn't know any books about it, but you could check out the film "Cadillac Records" for little bit of history.