A Language of Song: Journeys in the Muscial World of the African Diaspora

A Language of Song Samuel Charters A Language of Song Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora Duke University Press Durham and London 2009 © 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper b Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Scala by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The photographs from the Bahamas are by Ann Charters, and the captioned photographs from Trinidad are by Nora Charters-Myers. All other photographs are by the author. All historical materials are from the Samuel and Ann Charters Archive of Vernacular African American Music and Culture at the Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. “No Woman No Cry” is published by Bob Marley / Blue Mountain Music Ltd. All rights reserved. “Columbus Lied” by Winston Bailey, issued by Straker’s Calypso World, copyright controlled. for Annie, of course Contents A Note ix 1 A Griot’s Art The Story of Everything 1 2 Canaries—Canarios A New Music in an Old World 17 3 Go Down Chariot The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble. The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston 37 4 Skiffles, Tubs, and Washboards Good Time Music before the Blues 62 5 Red Clark’s List New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s 81 6 A Dance in Ragged Time “Shake the World’s Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag!” 105 7 Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence 133 8 Pretenders, Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow Trinidad’s Sweet Calypso 152 9 It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close Nights in Trinidad’s Pan Yards 178 10 Reggae Is a New Bag Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights 203 11 To Feel the Spirit Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem 230 12 A Prince of Zydeco Louisiana’s Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin’ Dopsie 254 13 ¿Como se llama este ritmo? The Music of Cuba, Bebo Valdés, and the Buena Vista Social Club 283 14 Bahia Nights Carnival in Brazil’s Black World 308 Notes 335 Bibliography 339 Index 343 A Note I think of this as a book about music, but it is as much a book about the journeys I took to find the music. I realized more than half a century ago that I couldn’t write about music in northeast Brazil or on an island in the Bahamas, or in Trinidad, Jamaica, New Orleans, Harlem, or the Georgia Sea Islands unless I’d made the journey there. I couldn’t write about a place if I didn’t know what the sun felt like on the streets, how the food tasted, what the earth smelled like, how couples moved when they danced. I took along the usual traveler’s guides, dictionaries, and phrase books, and since each journey was in search of music, I also had any notes I’d found to recordings, along with any books or articles or pamphlets that had something to do with the music I hoped to find. I’ve cited in the bibliography the materials I took with me or consulted, including books that I found in later years that helped me understand what I had heard. A helpful companion for many of the things I was looking for was John Storm Roberts’s Black Music of Two Worlds, and I would have missed many things in the Carnival season in Trinidad without Dr. Hollis Liverpool’s rich history of calypso, Rituals of Power and Rebellion. I often encountered newer writing that appeared after I had returned from my journeys, and there was useful information I wish I’d had at the time. An example of this is Michael Tisserand’s fineThe Kingdom of Zydeco. My journeys in western Louisiana went on for more than ten years beginning in the 1970s, but Tisserand’s book wasn’t published until 1998. I also later drew on the notes I’d made on many of the trips when I was either recording the artists I was meeting or talking with record company owners and studio engineers who were involved with the music I was interested in. Anyone who has read my earlier books or notes to the recordings will recognize the source of some of the incidents I included here. Of all the writing I found, two very different sources were most helpful. One was the letters written in 1838 from a Georgia Sea Islands plantation by the English actress Fanny Kemble, published under the title Journal of a Residence on a Geor- gia Plantation in 1863. Her insights into the psychological damage that the conditions of their bondage had inflicted on the slaves around her made me conscious of much that I was seeing and hearing. The other useful source was the three volumes of his collected interviews with living calypso artists that were transcribed, edited, and published by Rudolph Ottley in Trinidad in the 1990s. Ottley’s love for his subject and his objectivity in his writing about the artists remained the standard I tried to maintain for myself. I can only extend my thanks to everyone who has made some of the same journeys and who left a chronicle of their experiences for readers like me. I also hope that they enjoyed the music as much as I did. samuel charters Stockholm, 2008 x A Note 1 A Griot’s Art The Story of Everything Beginnings. Roots. Sources. Every story has a beginning. Every story has its roots. Behind every story is a source. In the story of the music that was part of the long African journey in the New World, there must be a beginning, and it must be a beginning in Africa itself, since so much of what the journey has yielded has its sources there. Even now, when so many centuries have passed, the roots of the journey lie in Africa. Many of the things that travelers have written about Africa—that it is large, that it is a continent of contrasts, that the land is hard, that it is beautiful, that it is cruelly poor, that its cultures are rich, that it is fascinating, that it is ancient, that it is new, that it is dangerous, that there is no way to understand Africa and its people without having been there—these things have been written again and again for hundreds of years, and they still are just as true. Traveling in Africa continues to be a thicket of experience that leaves everyone who journeys there in some way changed. The mass of land that is Africa is almost large enough to contain the United States and Western Europe, and there is nothing in the barren mountains that enclose the Sahara Desert in the north to pre- pare you for the broad, grassy plain along the Niger River at Bamako or the choked mangrove swamps of the Guinea coast, hundreds of miles to the south. The vivid contrasts of colors of the African land- scape become enough in themselves to change your perceptions of color—the gaudy flowers dangling over the walls of Dakar, the gray, thorny brush of the savannah, the green of the forests of Ghana, and the red of the earth where roads have been slashed through the stands of trees. It is the flaming colors of the African mornings that many travelers remember—the abrupt blaze of the sun flaring through the morning mists, the pale rim of the horizon flushing from faint yellow to orange, the endless blue of the sky as the sun- light floods the land. The story of the African journey to the continents and the islands to the west across the Atlantic, however, is only closely linked to one clearly demarked area of Africa—the coast of West Africa. It was along that coast that the slavers’ ships waited offshore for the African rulers who controlled the commerce to bring them their cargoes. The long miles of the coast still mirror the mingling of the languages and the customs of the European nations that at some point considered the lands to be part of themselves. The coast of the northern desert had Spanish rulers, south of it, in Senegal and Guinea—inland to Mali—the rulers were French. Farther to the south it was the British, their “pro- tectorate” beginning at Sierra Leone, in an effort of slave repatriation, then following the curve of the coast to Ghana, and ending in Nigeria. The Portuguese, still farther south, were the rulers of the last decades of slave commerce, with their stretch of coastline in Angola. It is that coast that was the source of the African peoples who became part of the journey to the new Americas. When I journeyed to Africa, it was that crescent of coast line that was my destination. I flew to West Africa in the early spring of1974 , and my journey began in the city of Banjul, the capital city of what was still known as The Gambia. My travels led me from Senegal to Mali, and south to Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria in search of anything I might learn about the sources of the American blues. Of course, what I found was much more than what I was searching for, and in the usual ironies of travel I learned that the sources of the blues itself were somewhere else. The first blues that I had already heard in Memphis or St.

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