Sam Charters, now 80, is a prolific author, having written on a wide variety of subjects and in several genres—music, poetry, fiction, criticism, and biography, among others. But it his writing about African American musical styles that doubtless represents his major claim to fame.
Charters was born and raised in Pittsburgh, lived briefly and went to college in California, and now divides his time between Sweden and Connecticut. At the age of 21, he moved to New Orleans, where he spent much of the decade of the 1950s. Indeed, he has spent considerable time in New Orleans over the years, devoting a half-dozen books or so to aspects of the city and its music.
A significant result of that first stay in the Crescent City was the publication of what seems to have been his first book, Jazz New Orleans: An Index to the Negro Musicians of New Orleans (1958). (A revised edition appeared in 1963, and it was that book which introduced me to Charters and his interest in New Orleans and New Orleans jazz.) In the following year he published The Country Blues, a study that has received acclaim as one of the classics in the literature on the blues.
Charters introduces the present book in the following way: “I think of this as a book about music, but it is as much a book about the journeys I took to find the music.” Those journeys began in the ‘50s and have continued down into the present decade—hence covering more than a half century—and I would say that the accounts of the journeys themselves and the lands visited are largely what I have taken away from the reading. The book is essentially autobiographical and written in a vivid, often enthusiastic, and eminently readable style.
A Language of Song is presented in fourteen chapters, each of which is devoted to a part of the world that he visited in the course of his search for the antecedents of African American musical styles: West Africa in the 1970s studying the griots/praise singers of Gambia; the music and dance of the Canary Islands in the present decade; the slave songs of the Georgia Sea Islands; Mobile, New Orleans, and Houston in the ‘50s looking at the forebears of the blues; the brass bands and “jazz funerals” of New Orleans; St. Louis and Sedalia, Missouri (Scott Joplin and the origins of ragtime); “rhyming” among the descendants of slaves on Andros Island in the Bahamas in the late ‘50s; Trinidad in 2002 (calypso and the steel bands); Jamaica in the ‘70s (reggae); New York’s Harlem, first in 1958 (“spirituals” and the social and musical importance of black churches); southwestern Louisiana from the later ‘70s (zydeco); Cuba in 2005 (Bebo Valdés and Afro-Cuban polyrhythms); and Bahia, Brazil in 2002 (Carnival in Salvador).
Charters provides no concluding chapter to his collection. So, what broad conclusions can we draw from his observations? First off, it is widely agreed that Cuba, Brazil, and the United States are the three cultural areas that have been key locations in the dissemination of African musical influences in the world. The author speaks of the “musical language of the African diaspora,” but he is quick to note that there are many local dialects. Pre-existing local musics—whether English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese—made their own contributions to the end result in each case. He often notes “the African genius for adaptation” and indicates that styles such as reggae and calypso have only “tenuous links” to their African backgrounds. Drumming and layers of rhythm are at least close to being common denominators of the African-inspired musics, yet even then there are exceptions. So, for example, he can observe, “Unlike nearly every other Caribbean style, the drums have a minor role in the reggae rhythms.”
Charters spent much of his life working for record companies, both in the States and Sweden, and that work led to many of these journeys. In most cases, he attempted to record examples of local musics and musicians, clearly being inspired by the earlier work of Alan Lomax. His entire archive of sound and video recordings, as well as photographs and notes and the like are now housed at the University of Connecticut.
Apart from knowledge of traditional New Orleans jazz and the blues, Charters probably would not consider himself a specialist in any of the diaspora musics. Hence I would hesitate to call the book scholarly or think of it as written primarily for a scholarly audience. There is a selective (but hardly exhaustive) bibliography and only a modest number of reference notes in the text.
Yet A Language of Song is an interesting and entertaining introduction to the subject. I found it a pleasant and most enjoyable read.
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[Review length: 790 words • Review posted on March 2, 2010]