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 Valdes. "A
Language of Song" is a unique expedition led by one of music's most
observant and well-traveled explorers.
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