Personal choices obviously vary since blues encompasses a very wide range of styles. That I understand.
I don’t buy that copycat label although I hear it a lot. You need to have lived hard times, etc., otherwise you are a copycat, etc. It is more of an intellectual rationalization than an emotional listening of music.
Blues is a feeling of your emotions and expression of it. It may have initially come through in the US with a history of pain related to living conditions, but they also adopted music traditions that existed before with the instruments and voices they had. Feeling of despair, pain, lost love, frustration, etc., don’t go away or are any less because one grows up in an easier life than in that past. Nobody owns the blues to call others a copycat or everyone is a copycat because every blues player out there grew up deeply influenced by the style of someone before them.
What matters is whether one is expressing blues and whether it moves you. This is true if it is Opera, Gospel or Country.
Having said that not everyone playing blues can get the emotional part right. Joe Bonamassa is technically brilliant but his songs lack that emotional appeal. John Mayall, a little better but similar. But it is not because they had an easy life and I wouldn’t call them copycats, just that they have mastered the art form but not the expression. Clapton or Clay have had their own personal issues that they put into music and wonderfully so adopting that art form.
Or to bring up the methodology of this site, perhaps we should make people listen in a blind test of blues of musicians that have had a hard life and those that haven’t and they don’t know how they grew up or their race and which is which and see if they can distinguish between who is legit and who is “a copycat”. If they cannot reliably distinguish, does how they grew up matter?