Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

 

The Bluesmen by Samuel Charters (Oak Publications 1967).  I bought this slightly shabby softcover copy a few years ago at a local book barn for five bucks.  The aforementioned Peter Guralnick cites the work of Samuel Charters as influential when he himself first became fascinated with singers of the blues (and when old, still-living blues singers from the earliest days of recorded music were being rediscovered during the folk music revivals of the sixties).  Reading this book I can see why.  Charters spent the fifties and sixties recording blues and jazz artists and talking with and writing about them.  I don't have any of his other books, but this one is pretty darn great.  It has chapters on the blues of Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, with sections on Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others, with lots of lyrics and musical notation, as well as first-person narratives from the singers or those who knew them or knew of them.  Great information throughout, and I appreciate Charters's writing style, although it's not as accessible as Guralnick's (being more impartial in a scholarly way).  I particularly like his straightforward description of what, exactly, constitutes the blues (pp.90-91):

"The usual pattern for a blues is a group of verses loosely held together by an underlying emotional concern.  Most of the verses are standard textual material, usually general comments tied to the particular situation that the singer has described."

Isn't that cogent?  When listening to blues singers (simplifying wildly here), sometimes it's hard to figure out why they are so good - with these repetitive lyrics that seem simple or pat - and yes, it's that underlying emotion that sweeps through the song like a river in flood and carries you along with it.  If the singer is really good, the emotion is often so strong that it almost doesn't matter what the lyrics are.  I've had a boxed set of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music for a number of years now, and in some of my favorite tracks (blues, country, folk, gospel) the emotion carries everything.  I mean, they are so hair-raisingly good that your flesh creeps. 

But back to Charters.  In the introduction (p.10), he says that by the time he and others got serious with their research into the blues, "...it was too late to do much more than trace the earliest sources and forms of the blues, but it was possible to learn some of the patterns of change and emphasis as the blues has moved - in less than sixty years - from rough field singing to the contemporary Chicago blues band style."  That's what he goes on to do in this book.  The results are fascinating and again had me making notes of songs to find later.  The book also has some wonderful photographs by Samuel Charters's wife, famous beat scholar Ann Charters, and illustrations of early record company advertisements (for what were called at the time "race records") and sheet music.

After all that shall I leave you with a song?  Even though Charters barely mentions him, how about Mississippi John Hurt's smooth rolling version of the ballad of Frankie and Albert, recorded in 1928, and anthologized in 1952 by Harry Smith in his Volume I, Ballads.  It purls along like a gentle stream, not a raging river, and I do love it so.