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NY Times, Mar. 19 2015
Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85
By LARRY ROHTER
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 Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, 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.”
Photo
"The Country Blues," edited by Samuel B. Charters. Credit RBF Records
Mr. Charters had himself succumbed to the lure of field work. In 1958 he
went to the Bahamas 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, James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite, were covered by
rock groups like Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf and 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 Bessie Smith’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.”
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