POSTING RULES & NOTES
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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.
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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
