Samuel Charters Walking A Blues Road

[garth cartwright]

As a teenager I purchased a copy of Sam's The Country Blues. I enjoyed it and filed it away then never looked at anything he wrote again. Why? Having picked Walking A Blues Road up in Peckham library I'm ashamed that I've ignored Sam for so long. This book, subtitled A Blues Reader 1956-2004, is a superb collection of Sam's writing across his adult life.

It begins with his 1950s infatuation with country blues and old jazz, covers profiles/interviews/sleeve notes he wrote for the likes of Furry Lewis and Henry Townsend and lesser known blues artists, goes into blues as protest, then him getting his head around the electric blues scene in Chicago in the mid-60s - he went on to sign Buddy Guy and Junior Wells to Vanguard and produce albums of theirs - then in the 1970s he went to West Africa to further explore the links between African American music and griots. He comes to a conclusion that while he loves a lot of the music he hears - and records some that must have been released by Folkways in the 1970s - blues is a genuinely American hybrid.

This is followed by more good stuff - long appreciations of Lightnin' Hopkins and Rockin' Dopsie amongst them. He writes clearly and enthusiastically, full of passion and hungry in his quest for knowledge. Nothing here from his time in the Bahamas (which Dave Peabody says is one of Sam's best books). Adam, I've got a new hero to add to the music writer pantheon.

[Adam Blake]

Adam, I've got a new hero to add to the music writer pantheon.

Funnily enough, my experience echoes yours in that I've only one of his books - "The Legacy Of The Blues" - which I read and thoroughly enjoyed about 25 years ago and never read anything else by him. I can't think why. I have several of the albums that it was a companion volume to and at least one of them - Bukka White - is an absolute benchmark to me of blues wonderfulness.

I guess there are too many blues books and it's easy to get blase.

I'm reading a trashy thriller at the moment so bear with me...

[judith]

Samuel Charters, I am discovering, is a very interesting man. He was kicked out of Harvard for 'political activism', moved to New Orleans at age 21 and remained throughout most of the 50's, was a producer for Country Joe and the Fish in the late 60's, then at odds with the politics, left the US and moved to Sweden. (source, wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Charters

Here is a radio interview, 1984. I clicked on the green typeface - Real Player and right now, as I listen, he has gone from Jelly Roll Morton's life, and New Orleans to more personal questions.
http://wiredforbooks.org/samuelcharters/

[Edit: I just went to the birthday list to enter his name, it's already there. Yes, I am boasting about how comprehensive the birthday lists are.]

[NormanD]

I did have the pleasure of briefly meeting Sam Charters when he was a Ping Pong guest on Charlie's Sat night show. I was helping with the phones. I took in a few of his books for him to sign (OK, call me what you want) and the one he was most interested in talking about was the biography of Vladamir Mayakovsky and Lily Brik that he had written with his wife, Anne. I wouldn't say that he was bored with the blues, he just seemed to have moved on to other musical excitements and interests.

[judith]

Thanks, Norman. That answers a question involving having heard Charlie talking to him on a show. I also checked 'search' and have found his name and books mentioned numerous times. It takes awhile for me to fully remember a name, and now I will remember Sam Charters. Hopefully.

[garth cartwright]

Thanks for posting that, Judith - a very interesting interview. He mentions - which I forgot - that his wife is Ann Charters, Kerouac's first biographer, historian of the Beats and a fine photographer. An interesting couple I think it's safe to say.

[judith]

:) when I read your reply, Garth, I looked up at my post and realized I'd spelled Sam Charters' name incorrectly. Now I've got it - with an 's' on the end.

[Charlie]

As a teenager I purchased a copy of Sam's The Country Blues. I enjoyed it

If a book can change one's life, this one did it for me, although I didn't realise it at the time when it was just one of many I was gobbling up. My immediate reaction was to buy an album by Lightnin' Hopkins, which became my first step into previously unknown waters.

As time went on, I would go back to Sam's book and read again the chapters I had skipped through the first time because I had never heard the singers under discussion, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc.

Later still, I had the temerity to think of trying to carry his story forward, to write a book about some of the black singers had had overlooked and ignored, particularly those who played with amplified accompaniment. Sam himself moved on too, producing various albums in Chicago with the same musicians who now interested me.

Much later still, he was a very lively and interesting radio guest.

[NormanD]

Much later still, he was a very lively and interesting radio guest.

Here is the summary and playlist of that April 2003 show http://www.charliegillett.com/playlist. ... e=5April03

This was just after the the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Charters was talking about the protests in South America - was it Brazil? - he had recently seen. In particular working-class barrios, he told us, the streets were packed every night, with women banging pots and pans, and people chanting "NO WAR! NO WAR! NO WAR! NO WAR!" (he chanted emphatically). It was a smart way to get a message across on live radio, and I admire him for this.

[garth cartwright]

I wish I had heard that show! It seems he has published much poetry and fiction too. Lots of reading to do, especially the Bahamian book which covers an island and its music I know very little of.

[Con Murphy]

There's a good (relatively) new Sam Charters book out (which I should have reviewed for fRoots by now - sorry ed!) called "A Language of Song" where he looks back at his travels around the African musical diaspora, taking in various US locations, the Bahamas, Cuba, Canaries, Gambia etc etc. It draws on his past works, including those mentioned in this thread, and doubles as a peripatetic primer (each chapter covers a different location) and memoir of sorts. A useful one to start with maybe, before tackling the vast and impressive back catalogue.

http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?is ... 223-4380-6

[Alan Balfour]

Somewhere I have a copy of a letter Sam sent to Moe Asch in January 1959 which starts along the lines of "I've found Lightnin' Hopkins!". Later in the letter he asks Moe to wire him $300 as he's run out cof money. Hopefully this will be either reproduced or cited in the forthcoming Alan Govenar LH biography.

[Alan Balfour]

It seems he has published much poetry.

His second blues book for Oak was entitled 'Poetry Of The Blues’, a slim volume containing lots of lyrics with commentary. I remember reviewing this and making the observation that song lyrics look bleak in print because unless one has access to the recordings you only experience a third of the whole, namely the vocal nuances and playing. This didn’t go down well with some readers one of whom, quite rightly, referred to me as a pompous prig.

[Alan Balfour]

I'm kind of steering away from Garth's original topic but couldn't resist scanning the opening paragraph of Sam's 1973 Oak booklet on Robert Johnson:

"I first started looking for Robert Johnson some time in the mid 1950's. I don't remember when it was, what year, what month I probably wrote it down somewhere but I wouldn't know where to look for I just remember coming into San Antonio grimy and red eyed from days of hitch hiking to get there, clothes sweaty and wrinkled going into the Greyhound bus depot to wash up then walking up and down the streets of the black neighborhoods asking people if they'd heard of a singer who'd made some blues records in town. The only thing I knew about him was the records, and that had been twenty years before, and it wasn't enough. I didn't have the name of a girl, the address of a boarding house or a cheap hotel. Nobody I asked had ever heard of him. Years went by before I finally found somebody who had and then I began to find that other people had heard of him, and it was possible to begin to think of the man as something more than a name on a record. The same thing has happened to Robert Johnson's music, to the handful of blues he recorded in San Antonio and Dallas those years ago. It was music that only a few had heard, and years passed, and then it was music that almost everybody had heard, even if they didn't know where it had come from."

One rarely, if ever, here's Sam's name mentioned with regard to early RJ researchers.

[judith]

I remember reviewing this and making the observation that song lyrics look bleak in print because unless one has access to the recordings you only experience a third of the whole, namely the vocal nuances and playing. This didn’t go down well with some readers one of whom, quite rightly, referred to me as a pompous prig.

Though I think this is very humorous as you are most definitely not a pompous prig, I don't understand how your statement about lyrics looking bleak in print would have made you a pompous prig. Wouldn't everyone like to hear the recordings as well? Am I missing something?