Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Poetry of the by Samuel Charters The Poetry of the Blues. The world’s #1 eTextbook reader for students. VitalSource is the leading provider of online textbooks and course materials. More than 15 million users have used our Bookshelf platform over the past year to improve their learning experience and outcomes. With anytime, anywhere access and built-in tools like highlighters, flashcards, and study groups, it’s easy to see why so many students are going digital with Bookshelf. titles available from more than 1,000 publishers. customer reviews with an average rating of 9.5. digital pages viewed over the past 12 months. institutions using Bookshelf across 241 countries. The Poetry of the Blues by Samuel Charters and Publisher Dover Publications. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9780486839585, 0486839583. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9780486832951, 0486832953. The Poetry of the Blues by Samuel Charters and Publisher Dover Publications. Save up to 80% by choosing the eTextbook option for ISBN: 9780486839585, 0486839583. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9780486832951, 0486832953. Samuel Charters obituary. Samuel Charters, who has died aged 85, was a prolific record producer, historian of and ragtime, an early explorer of the terrain of world music, musician, poet and novelist, but he was best known as a pioneer writer on the blues. The Country Blues, published in 1959, was the first book-length study of the genre, and its vivid portraits of musicians such as Barbecue Bob and Leroy Carr fired the imagination of a generation of readers. Together with Blues Fell This Morning (1960), a differently angled study by the British writer Paul Oliver, The Country Blues and the LPs that accompanied both books did much to create the interest in early blues that burst, in the mid-60s, into a full-scale blues revival. Lost figures of the blues’ past, including Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, were traced, and given the opportunity to make music again for a new audience. Charters had been there first, too, making a southern field trip in 1959 to record elderly blues artists such as Furry Lewis and Pink Anderson, and younger ones, among them Lightnin’ Hopkins. Charters was born in , son of Samuel Charters III and his wife, Lillian, and took up jazz clarinet in his early teens. The family, musical and middle-class, moved to California, where Samuel III worked as a railway engineer. Later Samuel IV would play guitar in folk groups such as the Orange Blossom Jug Five and the Blues Project. Making music led him to investigate it, and in 1951, after college and military service in Korea, he moved to , where he spent much of the decade in research that would lead to Jazz: New Orleans (1963) and other books on jazz. After the publication of The Country Blues he worked as a record producer for Prestige and Vanguard, recording both veterans and up-and- coming blues players. Many of the albums he produced have proved to be important documents and often the most sympathetic portraits of the musicians concerned. The 1965 three-volume series Chicago/The Blues/Today! focused national attention for the first time on musicians such as Johnny Shines, Otis Rush and JB Hutto. He also produced albums by Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and by the psychedelic rock band . He was now publishing steadily. After The Poetry of the Blues (1963), his bestseller, he looked again at The Country Blues and found it, as he told me, “purple, romantic, exaggerated … I would not defend many of the things I said there. It needed an overhaul.” He duly expanded it into two books, The Bluesmen (1967) and Sweet as the Showers of Rain (1977). The latter was written in , to which, in despair at the politics of the Vietnam-era US, he had moved with his second wife, Ann, also a musician but better known as a scholar of ragtime, a professor of literature and an expert on the writers of the beat generation. I met him in 1975, when he was promoting The Legacy of the Blues, a set of 12 albums he produced for the Swedish-based Sonet label and an accompanying book. During a long conversation ranging over his career, he explained: “My books pretend to be scholarly analyses but none of them are. They’re all political tracts. Throughout all my books, I was attempting to make the black expression an alternative to the suffocating dead weight of white American culture.” Sam’s ears were equally tuned to frequencies other than jazz and blues. In 1958 he made the first recordings of the Bahamian guitarist ; in 1972 he took the first of several trips to southern Louisiana to record cajun and zydeco artists; and in 1974 he conducted an African journey that generated several albums and the book The Roots of the Blues: An African Search (1981). Charters had another life as a poet and novelist. In 1973, while on a visit to London, he bought a notebook, wrote poems about parts of the city and left them in boxes on window-sills, or attached to fences and doorways. Other work, more conventionally published, included several volumes of poetry, Louisiana Black: A Novel (1986) – about revenge for a lynching – and his last book, The Harry Bright Dances: A Fable (2014), set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the 1950s. In 2000 he and Ann donated their huge archive of recordings, photographs and papers to the University of , where Ann had taught. He wrote little about blues in his last decade, but when interviewed for the BBC4 documentary Blues America (2013) by its director, Mick Gold, he talked as genially and illuminatingly as ever, and as politically. “I’ve been on the streets fighting, and I wasn’t fighting so somebody could play a longer guitar solo, I was fighting so that somebody could express some criticism, a voice to comment on what’s happening in America today.” He is survived by Ann, their children, Nora and Mallay, and his son, Samuel Charters V, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce. Samuel Barclay Charters, musicologist, record producer and writer, born 1 August 1929; died 18 March 2015. The Poetry of the Blues. "A signal event in the history of the music." — Ted Gioia, author of The Delta Blues Musicologist and writer Samuel Charters (1929–2015) considered blues lyrics a profound cultural expression that could connect all people who love poetry. A pioneer in the exploration of world music, Charters conducted research that brought obscure musicians of the American South and Appalachia into the mainstream. In this landmark volume, the noted blues historian and folklorist presents a rich exploration of blues songs as folk poetry, quoting lyrics by such legends as Son House and Lightnin' Hopkins at length to reveal the depth of feeling and complex literary forms at work within a unique art form. Originally published in 1963, The Poetry of the Blues raised interest in many previously unrecognized aspects of African-American music and made a significant contribution to the blues revival of the 1960s. This volume features now-vintage black-and-white photographs by from the original edition. Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85. Samuel Charters, whose books and field research helped detonate the blues and folk music revival of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Arsta, Sweden. He was 85. The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer, his daughter Mallay Occhiogrosso said. When Mr. Charters’s first book, “The Country Blues,” was published at the tail end of the 1950s, the rural Southern blues of the pre-World War II period was a largely ignored genre. But the book caused a sensation among college students and aspiring folk performers, like Bob Dylan, and it created a tradition of blues scholarship to which Mr. Charters would continue to contribute with books like “The Roots of the Blues” and “The Legacy of the Blues.” “We can mark the publication of ‘The Country Blues’ in the fall of 1959 as a signal event in the history of the music,” the music historian Ted Gioia wrote in his book “The Delta Blues” (2008). As “the first extended history of traditional blues music,” he said, it was “a moment of recognition and legitimation, but even more of proselytization, introducing a whole generation to the neglected riches of an art form.” Released in tandem with “The Country Blues,” which remains in print, was an album of the same name containing 14 songs, little known and almost impossible to find at the time, recorded in the 1920s and ’30s by artists like , , Blind Willie McTell and Bukka White. Mr. Dylan’s first album, recorded in 1961, included a version of Mr. White’s “Fixin’ to Die,” and within a decade other songs by the singers and guitarists whom Mr. Charters had highlighted were staples in the repertoires of blues and rock bands like the Allman Brothers, Canned Heat, Cream and the Rolling Stones. Equally important, the aura of mystery Mr. Charters created around his subjects — where had they disappeared to? were they even alive? — encouraged readers to go out into the field themselves. John Fahey, Alan Wilson, Henry Vestine, Dick Waterman and other disciples tracked down vanished performers like Mr. White, Mr. Estes, Skip James and Son House, and their careers were revived. Their song catalogs were soon injected into folk and pop music. “I always had the feeling that there were so few of us, and the work so vast,” Mr. Charters told Matthew Ismail, the author of the 2011 book “Blues Discovery.” “That’s why I wrote the books as I did, to romanticize the glamour of looking for old blues singers. I was saying: ‘Help! This job is really big, and I really need lots of help!’ I really exaggerated this, but it worked. My God, I came back from a year in Europe and I found kids doing research in the South.” Mr. Charters had himself succumbed to the lure of field work. In 1958 he went to to record the guitarist Joseph Spence (who would influence the Grateful Dead, Taj Mahal and others), and a year later he helped revive the career of the Texas guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins. He pursued overlooked music and artists on four continents for the next 50 years. Throughout the 1960s, as the audience for the blues expanded exponentially, Mr. Charters continued to write about the music and to produce blues-based records for Folkways, Prestige, Vanguard and other labels. “The Poetry of the Blues,” with photographs by his wife, Ann Charters, was published in 1963, and “The Bluesmen” appeared in 1967; during that period he also wrote “Jazz New Orleans” and, with Leonard Kunstadt, “Jazz: A History of the New York Scene.” By the mid-1960s, Mr. Charters had broadened his focus to include contemporary electric blues, producing a three-record anthology of new recordings called “Chicago: The Blues Today!” Songs from that collection, as well as from albums Mr. Charters produced for Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and Charlie Musselwhite, were covered by rock groups like Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and have remained rock standards. Samuel Barclay Charters IV was born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 1, 1929, to Samuel Barclay Charters III and the former Lillian Kelley. When he was a teenager the family moved to Sacramento, Calif., where his father worked as a railroad switch engineer. In writings and interviews, he recalled a childhood immersed in jazz and classical music. He dated his interest in the blues to hearing ’s recording of “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” when he was about 8 years old. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he spent time in New Orleans, where he played clarinet, banjo and washboard in bands and studied with the jazz clarinetist George Lewis while also researching that city’s rich musical history. He earned a degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the field. After the initial impact of “The Country Blues,” which would be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1991, Mr. Charters resumed performing music, more for the sheer fun of it than as a livelihood. He played with Dave Van Ronk in the Ragtime Jug Stompers and then formed a duo called the New Strangers with the guitarist Danny Kalb, later of the Blues Project. Mr. Charters was also drawn to the psychedelic music emerging in the San Francisco area in the mid-’60s. He produced the first four albums by Country Joe & the Fish, including the satirical “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” one of the best-known protest songs of the Vietnam War era. Mr. Charters had long been involved in the civil rights movement and left-wing causes, and the Vietnam War infuriated him. He moved to Sweden with his family in 1970 and acquired Swedish citizenship. For many years he shuttled between Arsta, a suburb of Stockholm, and Storrs, where his wife, who survives him, taught American literature at the University of Connecticut. Mr. Charters published poetry collections, including “Things to Do Around Piccadilly” and “What Paths, What Journeys,” and novels, among them “Louisiana Black” and “Elvis Presley Calls His Mother After the Ed Sullivan Show.” He also translated works by Swedish authors, including the poet Tomas Transtromer, who in 2011 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and wrote a book in Swedish, “Spelmannen,” about Swedish fiddlers. In addition, Mr. Charters wrote two books with his wife, an expert on the literature of the Beat Generation as well as a pianist and photographer: a biography of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and “Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation.” Mr. Charters wrote about jazz and blues until the end of his life. His book “A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora,” a series of essays on the evolution of music in places like the Caribbean, Brazil and the Georgia Sea Islands, was published in 2009. Two other books, “Songs of Sorrow,” a biography of Lucy McKim Garrison, who in the mid-19th century compiled the first book of American slave songs, and “The Harry Bright Dances,” a novel about roots music set in Oklahoma, are scheduled for publication next month. Besides his wife and his daughter Mallay, a psychiatrist, Mr. Charters is survived by another daughter, Nora Charters, a photographer, and a son, Samuel V, a naval architect, from his marriage to Mary Louise Lange, which ended in divorce. Mr. and Mrs. Charters donated much of their vast collection of recordings, sheet music, books, photographs and other documents to the University of Connecticut. “For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism,” Mr. Charters said in his interview with Mr. Ismail. “That’s why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization: I wanted people to hear black music.” Documentary Tracks Charters ‘Searching for Secret Heroes’ of Blues Music. A new documentary focuses on a legendary early 1960s film made by Sam Charters and UConn professor emerita Ann Charters about American blues musicians. Pinkney “Pink” Anderson with his son Alvin, known as “Little Pink,” at their South Carolina home in 1962 when they appeared in the film “The Blues,” made by Samuel and Ann Charters. PHOTO BY ANN CHARTERS (Department of Archives & Special Collections/UConn Library) Three years after publishing his pioneering 1959 book “The Country Blues,” the music historian and record producer Samuel Charters felt he still had more to say about blues music and the people who created it. Traveling throughout the southern United States throughout the 1950s searching for blues musicians, his book told the stories of , Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon, Pink Anderson, Sleepy John Estes, and many other bluesmen. “But there was no film,” Charters says in “Searching for Secret Heroes,” a new documentary that traces how he and his wife Ann, professor emerita of American Literature at UConn, decided to return to Tennessee and South Carolina with a single wind-up camera to make a film considered the first exclusively about the blues. The Charterses discussed the making of “The Blues” with Gary Atkinson of Document Records before Sam’s death in 2015 of a type of bone marrow cancer at age 85. The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African-American Musical Culture is part of the Archives and Special Collections at the UConn Library. Samuel Charters is a foundational scholar of the blues, whose writings, field research, and recordings helped to launch the revival of blues and folk music in the 1960s and 70s. He also wrote about jazz and produced recordings by Buddy Guy, Country Joe and the Fish, and Bill Haley and the Comets. Ann Charters is a specialist in Beat writers and an accomplished photographer who photographed the musicians for albums produced by her husband. The Charters Archives holds thousands of hours of recorded music on both analog and digital platforms spanning the entire 20th century and the early 21st century, including 25,000 recordings donated by Document Records. “Searching for Secret Heroes” was produced by Document Records, the American roots music label based in the United Kingdom and owned by Atkinson, who became a fan of the blues as a teenager after listening to recordings made by Sam Charters on the Folkways label. The film includes a restored version of “The Blues,” which was made in 1962 while Charters was recording in the rural homes of veteran blues musicians including Estes, Lewis, Anderson, , and J.D. Short. “The Blues” was not widely seen after its completion. Samuel Charters recording Sleepy John Estes in 1962. PHOTO BY ANN CHARTERS (Department of Archives & Special Collections/UConn Library) “Searching for Secret Heroes” weaves the narrative of the Charters describing their experiences making “The Blues” with compelling scenes from the 25-minute film, which is included at the end of the narrative. The documentary includes performances by the musicians and images of the extreme poverty – ramshackle homes and life without electricity or running water — and the racism endured by them – signs on businesses and hospitals indicating “White Only” entrances — which had driven Sam Charters to showcase their music. “What no blues singer ever was permitted to say was that the racial oppression was destroying their lives,” Charters tells Atkinson in the film. “So in the sequence of Baby Tate where he’s sitting talking to us, I wanted to you to know what was in his mind; that is why that sequence is followed by those signs of the white discrimination — white only, black only — even in hospital walls. They were everywhere in this apartheid state in the South of the United States.” The story of making “Searching for Secret Heroes,” restoring “The Blues” and the collaboration between the Charters and Atkinson, his wife Gillian and son George, began with a chance meeting between the two men at the rural southwest Scotland warehouse of Document Records in 2012. After acquiring Document Records in 2000, Atkinson exchanged correspondence with Charters about obtaining his original Folkways recordings for the label but did not complete their discussions as they each pursued other projects. The Atkinsons reside primarily in England and have a home in Scotland not far from the warehouse. They decided to head north for a week in 2012. Coincidentally, Charters was in his ancestral homeland with his son, also Sam, and daughter-in-law, Heidi, after locating a long-sought first edition copy of a 1794 book by his family namesake at a bookstore that happened to be around the corner from the Document warehouse. While Sam and his son were at the bookstore, Heidi walked around the area and met Gillian, who happened to be standing outside the Document building. As they were talking, the Charters men came by and as the discussion continued, Gillian discovered her new acquaintance was the author of the 1963 volume “The Poetry of the Blues,” one of the first books she bought as a teenager. She quickly ushered the Charters family into the building to meet Gary. “If Gillian hadn’t gone out that moment, Sam Charters would have been walking around Document Records and not knowing it and I would have been inside the office, not knowing that Sam Charters was walking around outside,” Atkinson says. “We just kind of laughed and smiled and were in disbelief for several minutes before I said, would you like to go for lunch?” Over lunch, Atkinson recalled that he had a copy the 1967 recording “The Blues,” produced by Charters and described as the soundtrack of a film. He asked Charters what happened to the film. “He said they only printed around about four or five copies, what they could afford as a young couple back in 1962,” Atkinson says. “I think that one university actually showed it at a music festival or something, but after that it never came to the surface again. Sam said he had lost his copy of the film for a long time.” However, Charters indicated he had recently found his copy of the film but it had deteriorated and had only a red color. Atkinson said his son, George, was a filmmaker and might be able to restore the film after converting it to a digital format. Charters returned to the U.K. the following year with Ann and a digital copy of “The Blues,” which the younger Atkinson was able to restore to its original form. Atkinson thought he should record an interview with Sam and Ann about the making of the film and possibly write an article about the making of the film. “But Sam was such a dream to interview and the filming went well. I dared myself to think that we could possibly turn this into a documentary,” he says. In the film, the Charterses describe the challenges they faced as first-time filmmakers with no technical experience and little financing. “Films are generally made with more than one camera. If you were using only one camera when you’re photographing music, when you change where you’re photographing it from the camera will be shut off,” Sam says. “I had this windup camera, we had my tape recorder. We were going to have to work with the fact that there was going to stops and starts when I moved the camera. I crawled on my knees to another shot. I accepted those problems and those limitations.” Ann adds, “I had taken lots of still photographs for his album covers. I was absolutely raring to go to be part of his crew. In fact, I was the crew. I held the microphone attached to the Ampex recorder and held it out of the line of sight of his movie camera. When he was finished filming and recording I would put down the microphone that I had held out to the artists and I would pick up my camera and begin taking stills. I just functioned on the dual level all the time. Of course I was happy to be part of it.” Sam ultimately did the editing at a film studio in New York City operated by a friend who allowed him to work at night when no one else had reserved the equipment, while Ann was teaching in New Hampshire. When he was done editing “The Blues,” Sam asked Ann to travel to New York to watch it. “We sat together at this really strange little sort of theater, where Sam had the editing, or some processing of that film,” Ann says. “Spontaneously we held hands across the aisle that separated our two seats in this pathetic little theater. We were so excited and it was so much better than we thought we could ever do. Sam had the great idea of showing it to our friends. So the next day he rented a 16 millimeter projector.” They scheduled showings at the apartments of friends around New York City, booking specific times to arrive and show the film, as late as 2 a.m., until having to return the projector. “We’re more than satisfied that [the film] existed, that the statement had been made — good, bad, or indifferent,” Sam says. “Others would do it better. I was sure this was only going to be one of many films. I had no idea that this would be the only one.” The title of the documentary, “Searching for Secret Heroes,” comes from an anecdote related by Ann, author of the first authoritative biography of Jack Kerouac, who she first met in San Francisco at the second public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem, “Howl.” “Allen Ginsberg once looked at me and said, I know the work you and Sam are doing; you’re looking for America’s secret heroes and that was Kerouac and himself,” she says in the film. “And definitely the people like John Estes and Furry Lewis.”