Samuel Charters

• Name — Samuel Charters • Birth Name — Samuel Barclay Charters IV • Born — 1 August 1929 • Birthplace — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 18 March 2015 • Place of death — Stockholm, Sweden • Occupation — * Music historian • writer • record producer • musician • poet • Education — Sacramento City College University of California, Berkeley • Children — 3

Charters was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into an upper-middle-class family that was interested in listening to and playing music of all sorts. "I grew up in a world of band rehearsals, blues records, and a whole consciousness of jazz.... The family also played ragtime, also played Debussy, also was involved in hearing Bartok's new music. It was a general musical cultural interest in which jazz was central" Charters first became enamored of blues music in 1937, after hearing Bessie Smith's version of Jimmy Cox's song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out". He moved with his family to Sacramento, California, at the age of 15. Charters says that he was "playing clarinet, playing jazz steadily all this time; I had my first orchestra when I was thirteen.... I had no natural abilities, but I soldiered on, and it was this that directly lead [sic] me to the beginning of the research". He attended high schools in Pittsburgh and California and attended Sacramento City College, graduating in 1949. After completing military service during the Korean War, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956.

In the 1940s and 1950s, though he was mostly immersed in studying and playing jazz, Charters also purchased numerous old recordings of American blues musicians. He eventually amassed a huge and valuable collection and beginning to understand that blues and jazz were connected in the history of black music. In 1950 he boarded a Greyhound bus in Sacramento, California, bound for New Orleans, where he sought jazz clarinet lessons with the great George Lewis. Instead, he found himself searching the streets in Texas for evangelist Blind Willie Johnson, who had recently passed. He returned to New Orleans, Louisiana, where he absorbed the history and culture he had previously only read about; he lived there for most of the 1950s, moving back and forth between Berkeley and New Orleans. He served for two years in the United States Army (1951–53) and began to study jazz clarinet with George Lewis. Charters was always interested in politics and had wished to play a role in public life, but because he had run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee while in the Army in 1952, he decided that he would have to engage in politics without holding any sort of office. "For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism. That's why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization: I wanted people to hear black music, as I said in The Poetry of the Blues.... It's where I say, you know, if by introducing music I can have somebody look across the racial divide and see a black face and see this person as a human being—and that's why my work is unashamedly romantic"). Charters always thought of blues as containing within it a small and pure strain of folk poetry, something that ran through the lyrics of early artists such as Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell, but which was lost in the later, more commercialized, blues. "I really got bored with all those damn guitar solos. To me, they all sounded like B.B. King, and what I really wanted to hear was great text...." The poetry of the blues, then, Charters thought of as profound human cultural expression that could connect all people who love poetry. Charters had for years been researching the history of jazz, but in the 1950s he also began to study the blues. Noticing that his copy of the bluesman Robert Johnson's recordings were recorded in San Antonio, Charters set out for Texas in 1953 to discover what he could about Robert Johnson and another of his favorite musicians, Blind Willie Johnson. With Charters's search for Robert Johnson began his years of doing field recordings (initially for Folkways Records throughout the United States and then in the Bahamas in 1958, where he made the first recordings of Joseph Spence). His 1959 recordings of the Texas bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins proved instrumental in Hopkins's rediscovery. Also in 1959, Charters published his influential book The Country Blues, the first history of blues and an absorbing account of his search for the bluesmen themselves, with a companion album of the same title to accompany it. He also produced psychedelic music, producting the first four albums for Country Joe & The Fish, including their song 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag. During the years of field work in the 1950s that lead to the publication of The Country Blues, Charters always felt overwhelmed with the amount of work required to properly document the music of black Americans and hoped that his writing would encourage others to join him. "I always had the feeling that there were so few of us, and the work so vast. That's why I wrote the books as I did—to romanticize the glamor of looking for old blues singers. I was saying, 'Help! This job is really big, and I really need lots of help!' I really exaggerated this, but it worked! My God, I came back from that year in Europe and I found kids doing research in the South.... They almost all came to me at some point, they wrote me a letter saying this is what I'm doing". It was at this point that Charters was asked by Ken Goldstein of the fledgling Bluesville Line of Prestige Records to travel to Memphis to record Furry Lewis, and then Pink Anderson in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Sam recorded a number of other bluesmen during these travels, which in part led to his firing at Prestige. It also led to the creation of "The Blues," the first-ever blues movie shot in the heavily racist American South, shot by Sam and his wife Ann. After disappearing for many years, the film reappeared in a package entitled Searching for Secret Heros, created and distributed by Document Records in 2020. Charters's writings have been influential, bringing to light aspects of African-American music and culture that had previously been largely unknown to the general public, as well as publishing poetry and novels. His writings include numerous books on the subjects of blues, jazz, African music, and Bahamian music, as well as liner notes for numerous sound recordings. In 1963 and 1964 Charters managed the newly formed Prestige Folklore record label. From 1966 to 1970 he worked as a producer for the psychedelic, anti-war band Country Joe and the Fish (all albums except CJ Fish in 1970). He was also affiliated with the European Sonet Records label and in 1970 produced Rock Around the Country, an album by Bill Haley & His Comets, for Sonet. He became disenchanted with American politics during the Vietnam War and moved with his family to Sweden, establishing a new life there despite not being able to speak the language at first. He divided his time between Sweden (where he had Swedish citizenship, though maintaining his U.S. citizenship) and Connecticut. He helped produce the music of various Swedish musical groups and translated into English the works of the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. Charters was a Grammy Award winner, and his book The Country Blues was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1991 as one of the "Classics of Blues Literature." In 2000, he and his wife donated the Samuel & Ann Charters Archive of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. The archive contains materials collected during the couple's decades of work documenting and preserving African-American music throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The archive's materials include more than 2,500 sound recordings, as well as video recordings, photographs, monographs, sheet music, field notes, correspondence, and musicians' contracts. In 2008, Charters published, A Trumpet Around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz. In 2014, he published The Harry Bright Dances, a short work of fiction, which he described as "a fable"; Things to Do Around Picadilly; and What Paths, What Journeys: New and Selected Poems. That year he and his wife also established the Sam and Ann Charters Collection of Swedish Art at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.

Charters's first marriage, to Mary Louise Lange at the age of 20, ended in divorce. In 1959, he married the writer, editor, Beat Generation scholar, photographer, and pianist Ann Charters (b. 1936), whom he met at the University of California, Berkeley during the 1954–55 academic year in a music class; she is a retired professor of English and American literature at the University of Connecticut. The two collaborated on many projects, particularly their extensive field recordings, as in the film The Blues (1962). In The Day Is So Long and the Wages So Small, Charters described their musical adventures on Andros Island in the Bahamas in 1958. He had three children, one with his first wife, two with his second. Charters died at his home in Årsta, Stockholm, Sweden, on March 18, 2015, of myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer.