Walking a Blues Road
A Blues Reader 1956-2004
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.
Samuel Charters belongs to a small group of writers about music whose work has transformed their -subject–without his discoveries, insights and interventions, the history of blues over the past 50 years would have been very different. This book is a -collection of his writings from 1954 to 2004.
Samuel Charters walks us from Houston, Texas alongside “Lightnin'” Hopkins and “Thunder” Smith to Memphis and Willie B, and on to St. Louis. The book includes chapters from his writing on the poetry of the blues and on country music.
