100 Books Every Folk Music Fan Should Own by Weissman Dick;

Author:Weissman, Dick; [Weissman, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

African American Music

One of the richest veins of American folk music is found in African American music. Spirituals, gospel songs, work songs, blues, and tangentially ragtime, all of these are inventions of African Americans. There are literally far too many books to reference in a short volume like this. Here are a few of the essential ones.

54. The Country Blues. By Samuel B. Charters. With a new introduction by the author. New York: Da Capo, 1975 (original edition 1959)

Charters covers blues from its earliest days up through the early careers of Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. The book includes biographical material on such artists and songwriters as W. C. Handy, Leroy Carr, and Blind Lemon Jefferson and surveys of specific styles, such as jug band music.

One of the virtues of Charters’s books is that they are quite readable. If Paul Oliver tends to be a bit dry, Charters writes in a style not unlike that of Alan Lomax, expressing his excitement about his musical discoveries. He makes the useful point that a number of the female “classic” blues singers of the 1920s, like Mamie Smith, believed that they were bringing an air of sophistication to the music, while the songwriters who wrote their songs similarly believed that they were taking raw blues to the next musical and artistic level.

Charters’s description of Blind Lemon Jefferson offers an interesting comparison between the art of Jefferson and the rough and “primitive” lifestyle that he lived. Charters also is quite clear on how artists like Jefferson were persistently cheated by both white and black agents, artist and repertoire personnel, and record companies. This was probably the earliest acknowledgment in print about a process that has subsequently become much better known.

The book’s description of Lonnie Johnson attributes a premature artistic death to that artist. Charters had no way to know that Johnson would be rediscovered in Philadelphia and would live out the last phase of his career as a respected artist in Toronto. Similarly, it is not the author’s fault that the major blues rediscoveries—Skip James, John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, and the others—all occurred after Charters wrote his book.

Not surprising, given when the book was written, there are some errors. Charley Lincoln was Barbecue Bob’s brother, not his friend. Charters doesn’t reveal many of his sources. For example, how does he know that Blind Lemon had two children and lived in a brothel in Memphis? Samuel Charters was (and remains) caught up in the romance of the blues, and his book was a starting point for a considerable number of later blues scholars as well as dedicated blues fans.

55. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. By Dena J. Epstein. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977

Although the title of the book refers only to American music, this comprehensive survey of secular and religious music includes considerable material concerning music in Africa and the West Indies.

The book begins by examining reports of African music on slave ships and then in the West Indies, where most of the slaves were brought.

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