[Dixielandjazz] Sam Charters RIP

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

THE GUARDIAN  Samuel Charters obituary 
Musicologist, record producer and pioneer writer on the blues    

Samuel Charters had a life as a poet and novelist as well as writing about music. 


Tony Russell
Thursday 26 March 2015 18.12 GMT  Last modified on Thursday 26 March 2015 18.17 GMT  
    

Samuel Charters, who has died aged 85, was a prolific record 
producer, historian of jazz 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 Pittsburgh, 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 New Orleans, 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 Vanguard Records 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 Country Joe and the Fish.
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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 Sweden, 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 
Joseph Spence; 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 Connecticut, 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