The series A Language of Song features the words of Samuel Charters and the recordings he produced as preserved in The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture at the University of Connecticut. The series is a tribute to the great Samuel Charters – poet, novelist, translator of Swedish poets, and renowned scholar of the blues, jazz, and musical culture of the African diaspora.  Samuel Charters died on March 18 at the age of 85.

In the second post in the series, together with a personal remembrance by friend and UConn Libraries staff member Nicholas Eshelman, Mr. Charters describes his recording sessions in Louisiana with Cajun and Zydeco musicians including the great accordion player Nathan Abshire.

The sessions were released on a series of record albums including The Cajuns – Vol.1: Balfa Brothers Orchestra With Nathan Abshire (SNTF 643 Sonet, 1973).  All of the recordings were done at the La Louisianne Studio, Lafayette, Louisiana.  The Charters Archives holds the recordings and documents relating to the recordings, such as the studio log sheets.

Sonet Grammofon was interested in a wide range of American music, and over a period of several years I recorded a number of Cajun groups. The trips were usually in connection with other recordings that I was doing western Louisiana – often Rocking Dopsie – but also Bill Haley and the Comets, since I traveled to Nashville or Muscle Shoals for his albums. There was an initial double album set titled The Cajuns, and a number of individual Cajun albums, including a documentary of the famed Mamou Cajun Hour radio broadcasts from Fred’s Lounge on the main street of Mamou.

In December, 1972 I finished a session with Haley in Nashville and traveled on to Lafayette, Louisiana to do a broad documentation of the musical scene there. I worked with four groups, and rounded out the sessions with instrumental duets by talented accordion player Bessyl Duhon and a guitarist. The sessions captured exciting music that could not be duplicated, though I was able to record several other excellent groups a few years later. For this album the Balfa Brothers recorded with the great accordion player Nathan Abshire and the superb two violin team of Dewey Balfa and Merlin Fontenot, and on later recordings with the group neither Abshire or Fontenot took part. The Ardoin Brothers recorded with young Gus Ardoin playing the accordion, and he was tragically killed in a road accident only a few months later.

I first met Sam Charters in 2001 when my wife, Kristin, took a job at UConn that included curatorship of the Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture. Meeting Sam was a big deal for me because my brothers and I had grown up listening to the records he produced, pouring over his liner notes and learning more from his great book, The Country Blues.  This was in the 1970’s when finding the blues, jazz and folk LPs we loved in a small Pennsylvania town was nearly impossible, as was finding any good information on how the music came to be. This made every record we did scrounge up something  precious, to be listened to over and over, so for this I felt I owed him a great debt and was more than a little nervous about meeting him.

Sam and Ann had invited us to their home, and we were privileged for this to happen many more times over the years.  I realized I could spend all evening asking him questions like “Did you know Gary Davis?” “What was Moe Asch / Dewey Balfa / John Fahey like?”  And not just because he always graciously answered but also because there was no end to the list of remarkable people he’d known, produced, helped or counted as friends. But by then he’d given enough interviews in his life  that he’d grown weary of them and I certainly didn’t want to pester him, in his own living room, with questions he’d been asked thousands of times before. Besides, it was just as fun to talk to him and Ann about other things, such the differences between national styles of aquavit (with samples!) or to hear stories about his hunting caribou in Alaska (for subsistence, not sport)  or of the colorful artistic and literary types he and Ann knew in Sweden.

I had only known of Sam as a record producer and  scholar of folk music and jazz. I soon learned that he was also a novelist, poet, translator, excellent classical pianist, jug, washboard, banjo and clarinet player, Korean war veteran, art collector,  jazz musician and literary scholar. And I’ve probably left some things out.  He was also tireless.

Into his 70’s and 80’s he traveled extensively and seemed to never stop working or finding new additions to the Charters’ Archive. Crazy things would happen to him in his travels. On a trip to Scotland to visit his ancestral home town, he stopped to admire the sights and was approached by a local who recognized him. She was the co-owner of Document Records, a company that publishes meticulously documented collections of rare American music. She and her husband, the other co-owner, had been inspired by Sam and were great admirers. They invited Sam in to chat and the result was the UConn Archives receiving the huge full catalog of the Document label for inclusion in Sam and Ann’s collection.

It was a tremendous honor to know Sam Charters. I’ve never met anyone else like him and certainly never will again. His contribution to music, especially American music, is enormous and invaluable.  And even though Sam is gone, his work and the music he loved, studied and recorded will be with us forever. One of the last things I wrote to Sam was that the Charters’ archive is in good, loving hands. I know someone who will see to that.

– Nicholas Eshelman

In tribute to the great Samuel Charters – poet, novelist, translator of Swedish poets, and renowned scholar of the blues, jazz, and musical culture of the African diaspora – we feature in coming weeks the words and recordings of Samuel Charters, collected and preserved in The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture at the University of Connecticut.  Samuel Charters died on March 18 at the age of 85.

Before Samuel Charters’ seminal book The Country Blues was published in 1959, Mr. Charters had been researching and conducting field recordings of the rich musical traditions of New Orleans. In his writings and interviews throughout his life, Mr. Charters often recalled his childhood, immersed in the sounds of classical music and jazz.  In 1956, Folkways Records released The Music of New Orleans.  The Music of the Streets.  The Music of Mardi Gras, recorded by Samuel Barclay Charters and produced by Moses Ash.  In his extensive liner notes, Mr. Charters writes:

“The aim of this group of recordings – done in the city in the seven years between 1951 and 1958 – was to find and preserve as much of the cities musical tradition as possible.  Here is the music of the brass bands, the dance halls, Mardi Gras, and the music of the streets themselves.  The music of shoe shine boys, vegetable criers, guitar players, and street evangelists.  The music that was recorded was as much as possible the distinctive music of the city.”

Mr. Charters’ book Jazz New Orleans, 1885-1957 followed in 1958.  In his inventory to The Samuel and Ann Charters Archives of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture, Mr. Charters tells us the story behind the book:

“Walter C. Allen was a research chemist and jazz hobbiest who published a series of Jazz Monographs, of which this was Number 2. He was responsible for typing the manuscript and designing the book, which came out a few months after I sent him the manuscript. The book had involved several years of research in New Orleans and then a long period of writing, and my advance against royalties from Walter was $5, which even that long ago didn’t really seem like a lot of money.”

Excerpted below from the liner notes of The Music of New Orleans.  The Music of the Streets.  The Music of Mardi Gras., is Samuel Charters.  

New Orleans is a gentle, sprawling city lying between Mississippi River and Lake Panchartrain on the Mississippi delta in southern Louisiana.  In its early years the city grew beside the river, and against the levees the small streets follow its great crescent curve.  …

The city’s remoteness and its colorful past have given it an easy self-assurance and a feeling of continuing tradition that is very different from anything else in America.  There is an open disinterest toward contemporary art, music and culture that dismays the energetic outsider who moves to the city.  There is almost as little conscious effort made to preserve the city’s own cultural traditions.  It is a relatively poor city, but it is a very relaxed city.  This may be because even in the poorer neighborhoods the streets are lined with one story wooden houses, rather than large tenements.  There is a feeling of spaciousness and sunlight.  The weather, despite the hot summers, is beautiful. … Living is relatively cheap, and between the docks and the tourists there is usually some kind of job around.  An old musician, laughing, said once, “It used to be if you had a minds to, you could go any place in the city and get a job on Monday morning because you ‘d be the only person around that felt like working.”  [Richard Alexis – in an interview in 1955]

In the nineteenth century the city was filled with music.  There were brass bands, string orchestras, amateur symphonies, and wandering street singers.  Dozens of little orchestras played for the endless social gatherings in the Vieux Carre.  Rougher bands played in the dance halls near the river for the longshoremen and the men off the ships.  With the social life, the long summers, and the dozens of resorts there was probably more music in New Orleans than in any city in the country.  The music does not seem to have been entirely distinctive.  The musicians relied on standard orchestrations from the New York publishing houses.  The French community carries on some of the French musical tradition, centered around its French Opera House, but unlike the bitter, resentful Acadians west of the city who rejected any non-French culture, the Vieux Carre was as much concerned with being “cultured” as it was with being simply French.

In the last years of the century and until about the time of the first World War the city was troubled with far reaching changes in social structure.  Because of an influx of new families there was for several years an overcrowded tenement condition in some of the poorer Negro neighborhoods, on the upriver side of Canal Street, the Creoles of Color – French speaking mixed bloods – were included in the general restrictions of legislated segregation, and a large district near the downtown business district was opened for prostitution and gambling.  Each of these factors contributed to the development of a local orchestral dance style that was to be the heart of American jazz music. …

The aim of this group of recordings – done in the city in the seven years between 1951 and 1958 – was to find and preserve as much of the cities musical tradition as possible.  The music that somehow captured some of this relaxed, romantic past.  Here is the music of the brass bands, the dance halls, Mardi Gras, and the music of the streets themselves.  The music of shoe shine boys, vegetable criers, guitar players, and street evangelists.  The music that was recorded was as much as possible the distinctive music of the city. …

Here in all it variety and glory is the music of New Orleans.

Sister Dora Alexander, a “colorful street evangelist who makes a meager living singing on the streets of Vieux Carre”, sings Times Done Changed (from Smithsonian Folkways):