Language of Song

Charters Samuel Charters

Description

In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters-one of the pioneering collectors of African American music-writes of a trip to West Africa where he found "a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem." In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.Each of the book's fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeans' first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves' songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaica's dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdes. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music's most observant and well-traveled explorers.

Sujets

• USA
• África
• États-Unis
• Africa
• Blues

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 06 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822392071
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

A Language of Song

Samuel Charters

A Language of Song 

Duke University Press Durham and London 2009

Journeys in

the Musical World of

the African Diaspora



© 2009 Duke University Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

on acidfree paperb

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala by Achorn International Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

The photographs from the Bahamas are

by Ann Charters, and the captioned photographs from

Trinidad are by Nora ChartersMyers. All

other photographs are by the author.

All historical materials are from the Samuel

and Ann Charters Archive of Vernacular

African American Music and Culture at

the Dodd Research Center, University of

Connecticut, Storrs.

“No Woman No Cry” is published by Bob Marley / Blue Mountain Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

“Columbus Lied” by Winston Bailey,

issued by Straker’s Calypso World,

copyright controlled.

for Annie, of course

A Note

i

x

 Contents

 1 Griot’s Art A The Story of Everything 1  2  Canaries—Canarios A New Music in an Old World 17  3 Go Down Chariot The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble. The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston 37  4  Skiffles, Tubs, and Washboards Good Time Music before the Blues 62  5  Red Clark’s List New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1 950s 81  6 Dance in Ragged Time A “Shake the World’s Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag!” 105  7  Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence 133  8 Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow Pretenders, Trinidad’s Sweet Calypso 152  9  It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close Nights in Trinidad’s Pan Yards 178 10 Is a New Bag Reggae Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights 203 11 Feel the Spirit To Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem 230 12 Prince of Zydeco A Louisiana’s Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin’ Dopsie 254 13  ¿Como se llama este ritmo? The Music of Cuba, Bebo Valdés, and the Buena Vista Social Club 283 14  Bahia Nights Carnival in Brazil’s Black World 308

Notes 335 Bibliography 339 Index 343

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. I realized more than half a century ago that I couldn’t write about music in northeast Brazil or on an island in the Bahamas, or in Trinidad, Jamaica, New Orleans, Harlem, or the Georgia Sea Islands unless I’d made the journey there. I couldn’t write about a place if I didn’t know what the sun felt like on the streets, how the food tasted, what the earth smelled like, how couples moved when they danced. I took along the usual traveler’s guides, dictionaries, and phrase books, and since each journey was in search of music, I also had any notes I’d found to recordings, along with any books or articles or pamphlets that had something to do with the music I hoped to find. I’ve cited in the bibliography the materials I took with me or consulted, including books that I found in later years that helped me understand what I had heard. A helpful companion for many of the things I was looking for was John Storm Roberts’sBlack Music of Two Worlds, and I would have missed many things in the Carnival season in Trinidad without Dr. Hollis Liverpool’s rich history of calypso,Rituals of Power and Rebellion. I often encountered newer writing that appeared after I had returned from my journeys, and there was useful information I wish I’d had at the time. An example of this is Michael Tisserand’s fineThe Kingdom of Zydeco. My journeys in western Louisiana went on for more than ten years beginning in the 1970s, but Tisserand’s book wasn’t published until 1998. I also later drew on the notes I’d made on many of the trips when I was either recording the artists I was meeting or talking with record company owners and studio engineers who were involved with the music I was interested in. Anyone who has read my earlier books or notes to the recordings will recognize the source of some of the incidents I included here. Of all the writing I found, two very different sources were most helpful. One was the letters written in 1838 from a Georgia Sea Islands plantation by the English actress

A Note 