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11/07/2006

Samuel B. Charters and The Country Blues, by Michael Gray

The fourth in a series of exclusive extracts from Michael Gray’s important new book, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (Continuum, 2006).



Charters, Samuel B. [1929 - ]

Samuel Barclay Charters was born in Pittsburgh on August 1, 1929. His family moved to Sacramento, California in 1945 and three years later he began performing in jazz combos in the Bay Area. He began making field recordings by jazz and blues musicians in 1955, and while everyone else who was in Memphis in 1956 was excited by ELVIS PRESLEY, Charters was excited to find old blues singers from the pre-war era, still alive and functioning: 'Gus Cannon and Will Shade and everybody with the jug bands.'

When Charters found them, and recorded them again for the first time in over 20 years, it made him realise something simple and powerful: 'that these people weren't from another planet, they were part of our life and some of them were still alive.'

In November 1959, the New York publisher Rinehart published Sam Charters' book The Country Blues - and it proved one of those rare books that actually makes something happen out in the world. Effectively it kicked off the blues revival that became a shaping force within the whole burgeoning scene that encompassed the New Left, the civil rights movement, the Greenwich Village folk phenomenon, the rise of Bob Dylan and more.

The blues that Charters drew to people's attention, and which he invented the phrase 'country blues' to describe, was neither the vaudeville-jazz sort they'd heard by Bessie Smith nor the electric post-war blues of MUDDY WATERS, Sonny Boy Williamson and HOWLIN' WOLF. It was the great hidden mass of still largely unknown, pre-war, mostly downhome blues, southern and unamplified, and as richly diverse as life under the sea. The Country Blues was a revelation and an inspiration to many, and prompted young, white, urban aficionados to trawl the Deep South and 'find' a number of old, black, rural musicians, who duly appeared in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, Philadelphia, Cambridge and Washington D.C. - among them many at whose feet Dylan was literally able to sit, soaking up some of the riches of their styles, techniques and musical heritage.

Charters' book didn't impress everybody. He pipped to the post the rather more precise and thorough-going, wide-ranging blues scholar and British architect Paul Oliver, whose book Blues Fell This Morning (in the US The Meaning of the Blues) arrived in 1960, as did American jazz writer Frederic Ramsey's Been Here and Gone, a richly photo-loaded account of travels through the 1950s South in search, as later editions said, 'of what might still remain of an original, authentic African American musical tradition'.

There was much carping too from some of those who felt that they already knew about all this music but hadn't troubled to write books about it. They felt that despite all the fieldwork Charters had done, in Alabama, New Orleans, Memphis and even the Bahamas, he didn't have a proper folklorist's interest in 'the tradition', but rather had the sort of flighty interest in 'originality' and 'creativity' that is just what you'd expect from a literary person with an inclination towards Beat poetry.

Charters' critics also felt that there were far richer seams of pre-war blues than those he had mined: that many of the figures he championed were second rate and that he gave too much attention to the lightweight, hokum end of the spectrum at the expense of the heavier, darker material born in the Mississippi delta.

In fact the LP issued as a companion to Charters' book contradicted this claim: it was deliberately wide-ranging but included tracks by BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON, BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON, SLEEPY JOHN ESTES, the very raw Tommy McClennan and ROBERT JOHNSON. It also included BLIND WILLIE McTELL's 1928 classic 'Statesboro Blues' - and after the HARRY SMITH compilation of 1952, AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC, the Charters record was the next most crucial release in the history of how pre-war music was regained.

Charters was subsequently responsible for 'discovering' the Bahamian songster Joseph Spence in 1958 (whose trademark rhythm Bob Dylan utilises on the faster, largely ignored version of 'Forever Young' on Planet Waves) and was active on the fringes of the Village scene in the early 1960s. Charters produced around 20 Folkways albums, recorded as part of the True Endeavor Jug Band, partnered HAPPY TRAUM's brother Artie in the New Strangers, was an A&R man for Prestige in 1963, oversaw many blues reissues and even produced early albums by Country Joe & the Fish. In the early 1970s he moved to Sweden and later that decade travelled in West Africa for his 1981 book The Roots of the Blues: An African Search.

Still alive, in 2000 Sam and his second wife, Beats-specialist literary scholar Ann Charters, established the Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Music at the University of Connecticut. But if he had done nothing else after The Country Blues, he would have earned his place in the history of the music, as a significant figure in bringing the pre-war blues world forward into the heart of the 1960s and right into the consciousness of Dylan's generation. And specifically, his LP The Country Blues almost certainly gave Bob Dylan his first hearing of the work of Blind Willie McTell.

[Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues, New York: Rinehart, 1959; The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, New York: Marion Boyars, 1981. Various Artists: The Country Blues, RBR RF-1, NY, 1959. Charters' quotes, phone interview by this writer, 08 Aug 2002.]



© Michael Gray 2006

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