The Roots of the Blues
African Search
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.
“I went to Africa to find the roots of the blues.”
So Samuel Charters begins the extraordinary story of his research. But what began as a study of how the blues was handed down from African slaves to musicians of today via the slave ships, became something much more complex. For in Africa Samuel Charters discovered a music which was not just a part of the past but a very vital living part of African culture. The Roots of the Blues not only reveals Charters’s remarkable talent in discussing African folk music and its relationship with American blues it demonstrates his power as a descriptive and narrative writer. Using extensive quotations of song lyrics and some remarkable photographs of the musicians, Charters has created a unique contribution to our understanding of both African and American cultures and their music.
