Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: In the summer of 1958, jazz and blues historian Samuel Charters traveled with Ann Danberg to Andros, a remote island "on the wrong side of the wind" in the Bahamas. Living within a small local community descended from a handful of Bahamian slaves, they discovered how the unique historical fusion of disparate cultures on Andros, from Africa and Europe, had resulted in a wealth of traditional music that had stubbornly resisted the influx of modern styles...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For more than fifty years the blues and the singers who sang them were nearly forgotten. Not until Sam Charters published his seminal The Country Blues in 1959 (still in print more than forty years later) did a new wave of interest in this great American music form take root...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Samuel Charters, the eminent historian of jazz and the blues, evokes the character and spirit of the self-professed inventor of jazz. "Funny and moving."--The New Yorker*

Offers a possible look at what a young Elvis Presley might have told his mother about his dreams, the attention he receives from fans, the effect he has on girls and their fathers, and his hopes for the future

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: The Blues Makers is Samuel Charters's monumental study of the blues, its makers, and the environment from which they merged. IT was originally published in two separate volumes, The Bluesmen and Sweet as the Showers of Rain, and for a long time languished out of print...read more

Frank Lewis, a complacent, middle-class Black, is roused to action when he recognizes a photograph of a lynched Black man in his son's history book as that of his father

Discusses New York nightclubs, theaters, concerts, singers, composers, and musicians and assesses each one's contribution to jazz

In a fictionalized memoir, Jelly Roll Morton, the great jazz piano player and composer, describes his life and career as a performer

Tony Smythe returns to an African country for the first time after its independence and struggles to understand the changes in his friendship with the native schoolteacher, Mr. Jabi

Product Description: One of America’s most respected authorities on the blues has delved deeply into the recorded legacy of Robert Johnson, transcribing each of his songs with dedicated accuracy and distilling the meaning of every sound and phrase. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: (Music Sales America). The story and the music of the men who made the blues, including Furry Lewis, Willie McTell, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and others.

Product Description: Blues is a language—one which has evolved its own rules and which is the sole property of a culture always forced to the periphery of white society. As such it is a political language. Whether it is passed as a legacy from African village to Mississippi farm, or from farm to Chicago ghetto, or from ghetto to Paris cafe, it is part of a larger oral heritage that is an expression of black America...read more

The popularity of the American musical form is illustrated in an account of its origins and development that emphasizes its relation to the lives and culture of black performers