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Samuel Charters is a renowned and influential ethnomusicologist whose many books on music include A Trumpet around the Corner: The Story of New Orleans Jazz; The Blues Makers; The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; Robert Johnson; The Life, the Times, the Songs of Country Joe and the Fish; The Bluesmen; and The Country Blues. In recognition of his writing, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1994. Charters is a Grammy-winning music producer, who has made many recordings as well as a documentary film, The Blues. He is also the author of four novels, numerous books of poetry, and a memoir.

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"From The Gambia to the Canary Islands, across the Atlantic to the American Deep South, New Orleans, St. Louis, Manhattan, down to the Bahamas, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, and finally to Brazil. These were staging grounds of the horrific African slave trade, which eventually became outposts of freedom and cultural and musical creativity. With beautiful, highly evocative prose, Samuel Charters describes a lifetime of tracing these routes and documenting the music that was created along them--blues, ragtime, jazz, zydeco, calypso, reggae, steel band, rumba, samba, and much more--music that has changed the way the world listens and dances."--David Evans, author of "Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues"

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A Language of Song

Duke University Press

Contents

A Note........................................................................................................................................ix1 A Griot's Art The Story of Everything......................................................................................................12 Canaries-Canarios A New Music in an Old World..............................................................................................173 Go Down Chariot The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble. The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston.....................374 Skiffles, Tubs, and Washboards Good Time Music before the Blues............................................................................625 Red Clark's List New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s............................................................816 A Dance in Ragged Time "Shake the World's Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag!".............................................................1057 Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence..............................................................1338 Pretenders, Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow Trinidad's Sweet Calypso................................................................1529 It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close Nights in Trinidad's Pan Yards......................................................................17810 Reggae Is a New Bag Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights.....................................................................................20311 To Feel the Spirit Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem............................................................................23012 A Prince of Zydeco Louisiana's Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin' Dopsie.......................................................................25413 Como se llama este ritmo? The Music of Cuba, Bebo Valds, and the Buena Vista Social Club................................................28314 Bahia Nights Carnival in Brazil's Black World.............................................................................................308Notes.........................................................................................................................................335Bibliography..................................................................................................................................339Index.........................................................................................................................................343

Chapter One

The Story of Everything

Beginnings. Roots. Sources. Every story has a beginning. Every story has its roots. Behind every story is a source. In the story of the music that was part of the long African journey in the New World, there must be a beginning, and it must be a beginning in Africa itself, since so much of what the journey has yielded has its sources there. Even now, when so many centuries have passed, the roots of the journey lie in Africa.

Many of the things that travelers have written about Africa-that it is large, that it is a continent of contrasts, that the land is hard, that it is beautiful, that it is cruelly poor, that its cultures are rich, that it is fascinating, that it is ancient, that it is new, that it is dangerous, that there is no way to understand Africa and its people without having been there-these things have been written again and again for hundreds of years, and they still are just as true. Traveling in Africa continues to be a thicket of experience that leaves everyone who journeys there in some way changed.

The mass of land that is Africa is almost large enough to contain the United States and Western Europe, and there is nothing in the barren mountains that enclose the Sahara Desert in the north to prepare you for the broad, grassy plain along the Niger River at Bamako or the choked mangrove swamps of the Guinea coast, hundreds of miles to the south. The vivid contrasts of colors of the African landscape become enough in themselves to change your perceptions of color-the gaudy flowers dangling over the walls of Dakar, the gray, thorny brush of the savannah, the green of the forests of Ghana, and the red of the earth where roads have been slashed through the stands of trees. It is the flaming colors of the African mornings that many travelers remember-the abrupt blaze of the sun flaring through the morning mists, the pale rim of the horizon flushing from faint yellow to orange, the endless blue of the sky as the sunlight floods the land.

The story of the African journey to the continents and the islands to the west across the Atlantic, however, is only closely linked to one clearly demarked area of Africa-the coast of West Africa. It was along that coast that the slavers' ships waited offshore for the African rulers who controlled the commerce to bring them their cargoes. The long miles of the coast still mirror the mingling of the languages and the customs of the European nations that at some point considered the lands to be part of themselves. The coast of the northern desert had Spanish rulers, south of it, in Senegal and Guinea-inland to Mali-the rulers were French. Farther to the south it was the British, their "protectorate" beginning at Sierra Leone, in an effort of slave repatriation, then following the curve of the coast to Ghana, and ending in Nigeria. The Portuguese, still farther south, were the rulers of the last decades of slave commerce, with their stretch of coastline in Angola. It is that coast that was the source of the African peoples who became part of the journey to the new Americas. When I journeyed to Africa, it was that crescent of coast line that was my destination.

I flew to West Africa in the early spring of 1974, and my journey began in the city of Banjul, the capital city of what was still known as The Gambia. My travels led me from Senegal to Mali, and south to Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria in search of anything I might learn about the sources of the American blues. Of course, what I found was much more than what I was searching for, and in the usual ironies of travel I learned that the sources of the blues itself were somewhere else. The first blues that I had already heard in Memphis or St. Louis, Alabama or Mississippi, were as close to a source as I would ever come. What I found in Africa were a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression I encountered everywhere in the lands across the Atlantic Ocean-from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana, and the great churches of Harlem. What I would learn in The Gambia, as one of its singers told me, was the story of everything.

The Gambia is a thin sliver of land stretching inland along the banks of the Gambia River, in some places no wider than the mounded earth of the banks and a strip of fields on either side of the muddy current. Banjul, which is two hundred miles south of Dakar on the Atlantic coast, was then small and still. A commercial traveler I met later on a coastal ferry shook his head when I said I'd been staying in Banjul. "That's a sleepy little place!"

The...