A Language of Song : Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora / Samuel Charters, Ann duCille.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Charters, Samuel, author.

DuCille, Ann, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (365 p.)

Place of Publication:

2009.

[s.l.] : Duke University Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

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

About the Author

Notes:

CC BY-NC-ND

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781478090717

1478090715

OCLC:

1055303235

Publisher Number:

https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392071

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access