A Language of Song

by Charters, Samuel Barclay

• ISBN13: 9780822343806
• ISBN10: 0822343800
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

InA Language of Song, Samuel Charters-one of the pioneering collectors of African American music-writes of a trip to West Africa where he found "a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression [he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem." In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following, documenting, recording, and writing about the Africa-influenced music of the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean.Each of the bookrs"s fourteen chapters is a vivid rendering of a particular location that Charters visited. While music is always his focus, the book is filled with details about individuals, history, landscape, and culture. In first-person narratives, Charters relates voyages including a trip to the St. Louis home of the legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin and the journey to West Africa, where he met a man who performed an hours-long song about the Europeansrs" first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slavesrs" songs on subsequent musical forms. In evocative prose, he relates a lifetime of travel and research, listening to brass bands in New Orleans; investigating the emergence of reggae, ska, and rock-steady music in Jamaicars"s dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdeacute;s.A Language of Songis a unique expedition led by one of musicrs"s most observant and well-traveled explorers.

Table of Contents

A Note

A Griot's Art: The Story of Everything

Canaries—Canarios: A New Music in an Old World

Go Down Chariot: The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble. The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston

Skiffles, Tubs and Washboards: Good Time Music before the Blues

Red Clark's List: New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s

A Dance in Ragged Time: "Shake the World's Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag"

Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini: The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence

Pretenders, Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow: Trinidad's Sweet Calypso

It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close: Nights in Trinidad's Pan Yards

Reggae Is a New Bag: Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights

To Feel The Spirit: Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem

A Prince of Zydeco: Louisiana's Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin' Dopsie

¿Como se llama este ritmo? Bebo Valdés, the Music of Cuba, and the Buena Vista Social Club

Bahia Nights: Carnival in Brazil's Black World

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.