Apologies but I no longer know the photographer's name |
Monday 27 April 2015
Friday 20 March 2015
SAM CHARTERS, THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE PHRASE "COUNTRY BLUES"
I'm very sorry indeed to learn of the death of Samuel Barclay Charters. He died at his home in Sweden on Wednesday this week, at the age of 85.
His 1959 book The Country Blues was as important as Harry Smith's anthology American Folk Music had been earlier the same decade - because it inspired people to action: to the seeking out of blues giants of the pre-WWII age. He also played a significant part in the story of creating album releases of Blind Willie McTell's work.
I interviewed Sam Charters by telephone when I was researching Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, and he was friendly, helpful, informative and lively-minded. This is from my book, and is looking at 1956 (just when Willie is making his last recordings in Atlanta):
His 1959 book The Country Blues was as important as Harry Smith's anthology American Folk Music had been earlier the same decade - because it inspired people to action: to the seeking out of blues giants of the pre-WWII age. He also played a significant part in the story of creating album releases of Blind Willie McTell's work.
I interviewed Sam Charters by telephone when I was researching Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, and he was friendly, helpful, informative and lively-minded. This is from my book, and is looking at 1956 (just when Willie is making his last recordings in Atlanta):
At the same time, 375 miles away in Memphis, Tennessee,
another enthusiast, a Pittsburgh-born 30-year-old called Samuel Barclay
Charters, is traveling around with his first wife, Mary Lange, and recording
old blues singers a bit more systematically.
Anyone else
with a keen interest in music who finds themselves in Memphis in 1956 is in the
thrall of rock’n’roll. Memphis is the
place to be in 1956. Here is the home of the wondrous Sun Studios, where Sam
Phillips has just been producing Elvis Presley’s revolutionary first records,
in one small, dark room that is now also capturing on tape the early golden
exuberance of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and more. In the same
room Phillips has also been commissioning pioneering modern electric blues
records since 1951, when he had glued the little white baffle tiles up on the
walls and ceiling himself to make the room a studio. Howlin Wolf had started
here, right then and there. Phillips said later, “When I heard him, I said,
‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’”
But that’s
not how Samuel B. Charters feels. He’s not in Memphis for this stuff at all. He
doesn’t even notice it. Decades later, when I interview him, I say “You were in
Memphis in 1956?! What a wonderful time to be there!” and he replies: “It
really was, yeah. They were all there,”
- and the people he means are old, pre-war blues singers,
and street musicians from Memphis jug bands: the very people that everyone else
in Memphis has forgotten.
These are the people he finds and records:
“Gus Cannon and Will Shade and everybody with the jug bands.” Gus Cannon and
friends, under various names but mostly as Cannon’s Jug Stompers, had done a
slew of recordings between 1927 and 1930, and never been back in a studio
since. Will Shade had led the rival outfit the Memphis Jug Band, and they had
recorded prolifically between 1927 and 1934.
When
Charters finds them, and records them again for the first time in over twenty
years, it makes him realise something simple and powerful: “the revelation that
these people weren’t from another planet, they were part of our life and some
of them were still alive.”
Three years
later, in 1959, Sam and Mary are divorced and in March Sam marries his second
wife, Ann Danberg, whom he’s met in music classes at the University of
California years earlier, and who will later write the first biography of Jack
Kerouac and edit his letters. Sam and Ann Charters live in a basement apartment
in Brooklyn, but that fall they’ve driven all the way across the States to stay
with Ann’s parents in California before embarking on a year-long trip to
Europe.
That
November, the New York publisher Rinehart publishes Sam Charters’ book, which
is called The Country Blues - and
it proves to be one of those rare books that actually makes something happen
out in the world. Effectively it kicks off the blues revival that becomes a
shaping force within the whole burgeoning scene that encompasses the New Left,
the civil rights movement, the Greenwich Village folk phenomenon, the rise of
Bob Dylan and more.
The blues
that Charters draws to people’s attention, and which he invents the phrase
“country blues” to describe, is neither the vaudeville-jazz sort they’ve heard
by Bessie Smith nor the electric post-war blues they’ve heard by Muddy Waters
and Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. It is pre-war, mostly downhome,
southern and unamplified, and as richly diverse as life under the sea.
On the LP
that he issues alongside the book, Charters’ compilation of a few of these old
records includes an elegant but restless, exhilarating track made in 1928,
‘Statesboro Blues’, written and recorded by Blind Willie McTell. (Statesboro,
Georgia, is the quirky town Willie grew up in, 49 miles northwest of Savannah.)
The LP is, in effect, a bootleg, since the companies that really own the rights
and the masters to these recordings have no interest whatever in releasing them
officially while at the same time their procedures for allowing others to lease
them make it prohibitive for any blues enthusiast to compile such an album
legitimately. Charters deals with this matter head-on in his sleevenotes to
this “bootleg” LP.
He has
acquired the mint-condition 78rpm record of Willie’s ‘Statesboro Blues’ that is
copied onto his LP from a cache of ancient but never-played Victor Records
found somewhere in New York State by another key figure on the scene at the
time, Len Kunstadt, who edits the tiny, amateur-looking magazine Record Research (which Charters writes
for) and acts as the manager of one of the known surviving grandes dames of the
pre-war blues, the redoubtable Victoria Spivey, who now lives in Brooklyn and
is just about to re-emerge from semi-retirement. Len will also prove to be her
last husband.
The 78s that
Len Kunstadt finds are of course regarded as riches, among the interested few,
but their monetary value is derisory, and will be slow to rise. Paul Garon,
writer and blues-specialist Chicago bookstore owner, recalls the prices when,
back here when the 1950s were just giving way to the ’60s, some Robert Johnson
78s were put up for auction by another enthusiast, Chris Strachwitz: “I
stretched my budget enormously and bid $2.50 each. I lost. When I saw Chris
later that year, I bemoaned losing the RJs (he was auctioning three of them),
and he said, ‘Oh, you lost by a mile. They went for $7.50 each!’” In
December 2004 a Robert Johnson 78rpm of ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ coupled with
‘They’re Red Hot’, recorded in late 1936 and issued on the Vocalion label soon afterwards,
in only fair condition, sold on eBay for $4,495.
When his book comes out on 5 November 1959, Charters is
working for Minke’s Closet Shop in Beverly Hills, putting up wall cupboards for
the Hollywood actress Cyd Charisse. In his lunch hour he stands around in a
little Beverly Hills bookstore, holding a copy of his own book so that people
might see the photograph on the back and realise that he’s the man who wrote
it.
Charters’
book doesn’t impress everybody. He pips to the post the rather more precise and
thorough blues scholar and British architect Paul Oliver, whose book Blues Fell This Morning would arrive in
1960, as would American jazz writer Frederic Ramsey’s Been Here and Gone, a richly photo-loaded account of travels
through the 1950s South in search “of what might still remain of an original,
authentic African American musical tradition”.
There is
much carping too from some of those who feel they already know about all this
music but haven’t troubled to write books about it. They feel that despite all
the fieldwork Charters has done, in Alabama, New Orleans, Memphis and even the
Bahamas, he doesn’t have a proper folklorist’s interest in “the tradition”, but
rather has the sort of flighty interest in “originality” and “creativity” that
is just what you might expect from a literary person with an inclination
towards Beat poetry.
Charters’
critics also complain that there are far richer seams of pre-war blues than
those he looks at and that he gives too much attention to lightweight hokum at
the expense of heavier, superior material born in the Mississippi delta.
Actually
this remains the main divide in the world of blues appreciation -
among the enthusiasts who start up small record-companies, the
fieldworkers and scholars who persuade the subject into academic legitimacy and
the writers on small magazines. Most of the white post-war champions of this
black pre-war music are predisposed to find heaviest best. Dark, smouldering,
Mississippi blues good; lighter, cheerful, South-Eastern blues much less good.
When we
come to ask how and when, after his death, Blind Willie McTell becomes famous,
we find that the answer is slowly and moderately - and
part of the reason is precisely because he isn’t Mississippi, he isn’t raw and
dark.
In any
case, Sam Charters’ The Country Blues spreads
the news of this music to a larger number of people. It also prompts many a
young urban white to take a trip down to the Deep South in search of the old
rural blacks whose records from decades earlier are just beginning to be issued
for the first time on 33rpm vinyl by like-minded young enthusiasts -
records that reveal to them this other, more magical music universe.
Some
successes are scored. The frail, eerie recordings of Skip James from 1931 are
all people have to go on, but he is found, alive, back where he’d started from,
in a tiny town in Mississippi. He will appear like a ghost on stage at the
Newport Folk Festival in 1964, having never recorded in the intervening 33
years. Mississippi John Hurt, a kind and gentle man whose last foray into a
recording studio was in 1928, is descended upon similarly and plucked back into
the world of public performance - a world where that public has changed out of
all recognition.
Son House,
another once-towering figure, is rediscovered, not in a shack in a field in
Mississippi but in a rough part of Rochester, New York - and
he too finds himself up on stage for the first time in decades, playing to
young white audiences in the coffee-houses of Greenwich Village and Boston,
Philadelphia and Washington D.C..
Blind
Willie McTell is one of those sought out
- but too late. Nobody knows it
yet but he is already dead. He dies eleven weeks and a day before the release
of his ‘Statesboro Blues’ on the Sam Charters LP.
Tuesday 19 August 2014
55 YEARS GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Blind Willie McTell died at 4.25am local time in Milledgeville State Hospital, Georgia, 55 years ago today.
For an account of the circumstances, see today's post on my other blog OUTTAKES.
Sunday 8 September 2013
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NIAGARA FALLS
I'm giving a short series of talks in the US again this year, from late September to early October; the last two events both feature Blind Willie McTell and take place on adjacent days, way down yonder in New Orleans and way up by the Canadian border in New York State. The former, Bob Dylan, Willie McTell and the Blues, is at Tulane University at 5pm on October 7; the latter, Searching For Blind Willie McTell, is at 7.30pm on October 8 at Daemen College, Amherst NY. Here's the poster for this one, designed in-house:
Wednesday 24 April 2013
BLIND WILLIE'S ORIGINAL GRAVESTONE
I'm delighted to learn, thanks to Mr. Jim Stagg, bass guitarist of the rather good band Cooper Black, that Blind Willie's original gravestone is back in McDuffie County - if not in Happy Valley then at least in Thomson GA - in very good condition and in the care of the Thomson Museum, as you see here (c/o Jim's wife, whose name I'm sorry I don't know):
As you will know, he wasn't called Eddie - that was the name of the cousin who commissioned the stone - and he wasn't born in 1898 but in 1903, quite probably on May 5th.
As you will know, he wasn't called Eddie - that was the name of the cousin who commissioned the stone - and he wasn't born in 1898 but in 1903, quite probably on May 5th.
Tuesday 12 February 2013
Eubie Blake died 30 years ago today, claiming to be 100. Not quite. But he could make any number of other claims. Here he is at a genuine 93 years of age and glorious:
Saturday 10 November 2012
DEATH OF IDA COX, 45 YEARS AGO TODAY
Ida Cox, born 1896, was one of the "classic" pre-war blues singers, and one whose records Blind Willie McTell attended to. She died this day in 1967. Here's her 'Graveyard Dream Blues' from 1923:
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