Re: [Marxism] Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Great stuff. An uninformed question: how is what Charters did compare to the Lomaxes? Apples and oranges? On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 7:14 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * 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
Re: [Marxism] Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 3/20/15 12:54 PM, Andrew Pollack wrote: Great stuff. An uninformed question: how is what Charters did compare to the Lomaxes? Apples and oranges? They were all great. Btw, there is an immense online audio archive based on Lomax's field recordings here: http://research.culturalequity.org/home-audio.jsp _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * That audio archive is nice, but you can still get a lot of those recordings on vinyl at decent prices. Check out Testament, Rounder, and Blind Pig labels. I just sold the first recording of Muddy Waters by Lomax, put to vinyl on Testament, for a mere $20. http://www.discogs.com/label/77275-Testament-Records Greg _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Samuel Charters, Foundational Scholar of the Blues, Dies at 85
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * 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
