Reviews
A richly textured collection of memories and observations ... terrific.Straight No Chaser
Just about the best 'what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation' report ever written.
Booklist (starred review)
The Day is So Long and the Wages So Small
Music on a Summer Island
Samuel Charters [+–]
Samuel Charters is a novelist, poet and eminent historian of jazz and the blues. His books include The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, Jelly Roll Morton’s Last Night at the Jungle Inn, The Legacy of the Blues: The Art and Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen, New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus, The Day is so Long and the Wages so Small: Music on a Summer Island and the novel Louisiana Black.
In the summer of 1958 Samuel Charters and Ann Danberg travelled to Andros, an ‘island on the wrong side of the wind’ in the Bahamas. They were drawn to this remote location by a song, so rich and startling in its resonance that they followed it to its source.
In The Day is So Long and the Wages So Small Charters recalls the unique experience of this incredible summer. Living within the small yet vital community descended from a handful of Bahamian slaves, Charters and Danberg discovered the pleasures and the harsh realities of island life.
They also found that the historical fusion of disparate cultures on Andros, from Africa and Europe, had resulted in a rich, distinctive musical confluence that stubbornly resisted the influx of modern styles. The invaluable recordings they made that summer introduced the world to the guitar music of Joseph Spence, the ballads and ‘rhyming’ songs of John Roberts and Frederick McQueen, and a wealth of traditional Bahamian music.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Appendix
Straight No Chaser
Just about the best 'what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation' report ever written.
Booklist (starred review)