A Language of Song: Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora

363 Pages·2009·3.064 MB·

by  Samuel Charters

A Language of Song

Samuel Charters
A Language of Song

Journeys in
the Musical World of
the African Diaspora

Duke University Press Durham and London 2009
© 2009 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper b
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Scala by Achorn International
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data appear on the last printed page of this
book.
The photographs from the Bahamas are
by Ann Charters, and the captioned photographs from
Trinidad are by Nora Charters-Myers. All
other photographs are by the author.
All historical materials are from the Samuel
and Ann Charters Archive of Vernacular
African American Music and Culture at
the Dodd Research Center, University of
Connecticut, Storrs.
“No Woman No Cry” is published by Bob
Marley / Blue Mountain Music Ltd. All rights
reserved.
“Columbus Lied” by Winston Bailey,
issued by Straker’s Calypso World,
copyright controlled.
 for Annie, of course

 Contents
A Note ix
 1 A Griot’s Art The Story of Everything 1
 2 Canaries—Canarios A New Music in an Old World 17
 3  G  o Down Chariot The Georgia Sea Islands and Fanny Kemble.
The Slavery Spirituals, Lydia Parrish and Zora Neale Hurston 37
 4 Skiffles, Tubs, and Washboards
Good Time Music before the Blues 62
 5 Red Clark’s List
New Orleans Street Jazz and the Eureka Brass Band in the 1950s 81
 6 A Dance in Ragged Time
“Shake the World’s Foundation with the Maple Leaf Rag!” 105
 7 Gal, You Got to Go Back to Bimini
The Bahamas, Its Rhymers, and Joseph Spence 133
 8 Pretenders, Caressers, Lions, and a Mighty Sparrow
Trinidad’s Sweet Calypso 152
 9 It Be Like Thunder if a Man Live Close
Nights in Trinidad’s Pan Yards 178
10 Reggae Is a New Bag Kingston Streets, Kingston Nights 203
11 To Feel the Spirit
Gospel Song in the Great Churches of Harlem 230
12 A Prince of Zydeco
Louisiana’s Zydeco Blues and Good Rockin’ Dopsie 254
13 ¿Como se llama este ritmo?
The Music of Cuba, Bebo Valdés, and the Buena Vista Social Club 283
14 Bahia Nights Carnival in Brazil’s Black World 308
Notes 335
Bibliography 339
Index 343

 A Note
I think of this as a book about music, but it is as much a book about
the journeys I took to find the music. I realized more than half a
century ago that I couldn’t write about music in northeast Brazil or
on an island in the Bahamas, or in Trinidad, Jamaica, New Orleans,
Harlem, or the Georgia Sea Islands unless I’d made the journey
there. I couldn’t write about a place if I didn’t know what the sun
felt like on the streets, how the food tasted, what the earth smelled
like, how couples moved when they danced. I took along the usual
traveler’s guides, dictionaries, and phrase books, and since each
journey was in search of music, I also had any notes I’d found to
recordings, along with any books or articles or pamphlets that had
something to do with the music I hoped to find. I’ve cited in the
bibliography the materials I took with me or consulted, including
books that I found in later years that helped me understand what
I had heard.
A helpful companion for many of the things I was looking for
was John Storm Roberts’s Black Music of Two Worlds, and I would
have missed many things in the Carnival season in Trinidad without
Dr. Hollis Liverpool’s rich history of calypso, Rituals of Power and
Rebellion. I often encountered newer writing that appeared after I
had returned from my journeys, and there was useful information I
wish I’d had at the time. An example of this is Michael Tisserand’s
fine The Kingdom of Zydeco. My journeys in western Louisiana went
on for more than ten years beginning in the 1970s, but Tisserand’s
book wasn’t published until 1998.
I also later drew on the notes I’d made on many of the trips when
I was either recording the artists I was meeting or talking with
record company owners and studio engineers who were involved
with the music I was interested in. Anyone who has read my earlier
books or notes to the recordings will recognize the source of some
of the incidents I included here. Of all the writing I found, two very
different sources were most helpful. One was the letters written in
1838 from a Georgia Sea Islands plantation by the English actress
Fanny Kemble, published under the title Journal of a Residence on a Geor-
gia Plantation in 1863. Her insights into the psychological damage that
the conditions of their bondage had inflicted on the slaves around her
made me conscious of much that I was seeing and hearing. The other
useful source was the three volumes of his collected interviews with
living calypso artists that were transcribed, edited, and published by
Rudolph Ottley in Trinidad in the 1990s. Ottley’s love for his subject and
his objectivity in his writing about the artists remained the standard I
tried to maintain for myself.
I can only extend my thanks to everyone who has made some of the
same journeys and who left a chronicle of their experiences for readers
like me. I also hope that they enjoyed the music as much as I did.
samuel charters
Stockholm, 2008
 A Note