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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.