Samuel Charters: 6 books

In A 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...

"A signal event in the history of the music." — Ted Gioia, author of The Delta Blues Musicologist and writer Samuel Charters (1929–2015) considered blues lyrics a profound cultural expression that could connect all people who love poetry. A pioneer in the exploration of world music,...

Samuel Charters has been studying and writing about New Orleans music for more than fifty years. A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz is the first book to tell the entire story of a century of jazz in New Orleans. Although there is still controversy over the racial origins and...

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were--in Holmes's words--"Brother Souls." Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in a postwar...

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac’s life they were—in Holmes’s words—“Brother Souls.” Both were neophyte novelists, hungry for literary fame but just as hungry to find a new way of responding to their experiences in...

In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. During her stay she heard the singing...