Samuel Charters

Samuel Barclay Charters IV (August 1, 1929 – March 18, 2015) was an American music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet. He was a widely published author on the subjects of blues and jazz. He also wrote fiction.

Early life and education 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".

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".

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.

Personal life 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. 1962, Ann Charters: An Essay in Ragtime. Folkways Records. 1963, J.D. Short/Son House: The Blues of the Mississippi Delta. Folkways Records. 1964, Ali Akbar Kahn and Ravi Shankar: The Master Musicians of India. Prestige Records. 1964, The Holy Modal Rounders. Prestige Records. 1964, The Music of the Bahamas: Vol. 1 Bahaman Folk Guitar, Joseph Spence. Folkways Records. 1964, The Music of the Bahamas: Vol. 2 Sacred Music, Launching Songs, and Ballads. Folkways Records. 1964, The Music of the Bahamas: Vol. 3 Instrumental Music from the Bahamas. Folkways Records. 1964, New Orleans Jazz The 'Twenties Folkways Records. 1965, Herman Melville: Moby Dick or The Whale. Read by Louis Zorich. Folkways Records. 1965, Charles Ives: The Sonatas for Violin and Piano. Folkways Records. 1965, Charles Ives: The Short Piano Pieces. Folkways Records. 1965, Chicago Blues (Vols. 1 - 3). Series titled "Chicago/The Blues/Today!" Vanguard Records. 1965, "Terry Callier: The New Folk Sound of Terry Callier." Prestige Records. 1967, Country Joe and the Fish: Electric Music for the Mind and Body. Vanguard Records. 1967, Country Joe and the Fish: I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die. Vanguard Records. 1967, Buddy Guy: A Man and the Blues. Vanguard Records. 1968, John Fahey: Requia. Vanguard Records. 1968, Junior Wells: Coming at You! Vanguard Records. 1968, Buddy Guy: This is Buddy Guy! Vanguard Records. 1967, Country Joe & The Fish: Here We Are Again 1969, The Frost: Frost Music. Vanguard Records. 1969, The Frost: Rock and Roll Music. Vanguard Records. 1970, Bill Haley and the Comets: Travelin' Band. Janus Records. Released in Sweden by Sonet Records under the title Rock Around the Country. 1971, Skaggmanslaget: Snus, mus och brannvin. Sonet Records. 1971, Stefan Grossman: Those Pleasant Days. Transatlantic Records. 1971, Misc. Artists: Spellmansstamma i Delsbo. Sonet Records. 1972, The Cajuns (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.). Sonet Records. 1972, Peps Persson: The Week Peps Came to Chicago. Sonet Records. 1972, Ann Charters: A Joplin Bouquet. (Originally self-released on Portents Records, 1964.) GNP Records. 1973, Stefan Grossman: Live. Transatlantic. 1974, Peps Blodsband: Peps Blodsband. Sonet Records. 1974, Ann Charters: The Genius of Scott Joplin. Sonet Records. 1975, African Journey: A Search for the Roots of the Blues. Vanguard Records. 1975. Peps Blodsband: Hog Standard. Sonet Records. 1975, The Griots: Ministers of the Spoken Word. Ethnic Folkways Library. 1976, Rockin' Dopsie and the Cajun Twisters: Doin' the Zydeco. Sonet Records. 1977, Jerry Williams and Roadwork: Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die. Sonet Records. 1978, African Flute, The Gambia. Folkways Records. 1979, Jerry Williams and Roadwork: I Can Jive. Sonet Records. 1982, Clifton Chenier and His Red Hot Louisiana Band: I'm Here. Sonet Records. 1985, The Klezmer Conservatory Band: A Touch of Klez! Vanguard Records. 1990, Dave van Ronk: Hummin' to Myself. Gazell Records. 1990, The Fugs: Songs from a Portable Forest. Gazell Records. 1998, Bebo Valdes: Recuerdos de Habana. Gazell Records.