A Language of Song

Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora

Samuel Charters

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780822343806
  9780822343585
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822392071
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

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 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 book'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 Europeans' first colonial conquests in Gambia. Throughout the book, Charters traces the persistence of African musical culture despite slavery, as well as the influence of slaves' 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 Jamaica's dancehalls; and exploring the history of Afro-Cuban music through the life of the jazz musician Bebo Valdés. A Language of Song is a unique expedition led by one of music's most observant and well-traveled explorers.

Table of contents

• Contents
• A Note
• 1 A Griot’s Art The Story of Everything
• 2 Canaries—Canarios: A New Music in an Old World
• 3 Go Down Chariot: The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble: The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston
• 4 Skiffles, Tubs, and Washboards: Good Time Music before the Blues
• 5 Red Clark’s List: New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s
• 6 A Dance in Ragged Time: “Shake the World’s Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag!”
• 7 Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini: The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence
• 8 Pretenders, Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow: Trinidad’s Sweet Calypso
• 9 It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close: Nights in Trinidad’s Pan Yards
• 10 Reggae Is a New Bag Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights
• 11 To Feel the Spirit: Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem
• 12 A Prince of Zydeco: Louisiana’s Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin’ Dopsie
• 13 ¿Como se llama este ritmo?: The Music of Cuba, Bebo Valdés, and the Buena Vista Social Club
• 14 Bahia Nights Carnival in Brazil’s Black World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index