Samuel Charters Interview for Blues Discovery: An Excerpt

Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide, was a book I wrote middle and late 1990s. The subject of the book was the discovery of what we often call The Country Blues (recorded in the 1920s to 1940s) by young whites in the 1950s and 1960s. My conduit to the story was the experiences of an old family friend, Roger Brown, who had grown up in Atlanta in the 1950s and had discovered this old Country Blues in the early 1960s when he found reissues of blues records in record stores in Atlanta.

Samuel Charters recording Sleepy John Estes, Brownsville, TN 1962. Photo by Ann Charters

And one of the most important discoveries of Roger’s young life was the work of Samuel B. Charters (1929-2015), a legend in Jazz and blues writing whose books The Country Blues (1959) and Bluesmen (1967) revolutionized how people understood the rural bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, and other brilliant musicians whose work had mostly been forgotten. Roger was inspired to drive to Memphis with his buddy, George Mitchell, in the early 1960s when he discovered that Charters had gone to Memphis and met Will Shade and Willie Borum—and recorded them!

So, when I was writing Blues Discovery, I wanted to hear the stories of some other young people who’d discovered blues in the 1950s and 60s, and so I wrote to a variety of people whose writing or recordings I knew about. Most of them said they would only talk to me if I paid them $1,000 or more for their stories. And given that I was massively underemployed at the time, that was a laughable proposition. But when I took a chance and wrote to Samuel Charters, oddly enough he—the most important of all of them— immediately and unreservedly agreed to talk to me—a complete nobody. A real gentleman!

And so I was able to conduct an interview with the legend himself. And what follows is an extract from that conversation. [I used this conversation, by the way, to re-write the Wikipedia article about Charters. When Sam died, I saw the obituary in the NYT in which the Wikipedia article was obviously used as a source, since it quoted information directly from my interview with him, but of course it was not cited!] The whole interview is in Blues Discovery:

We pick up at a point at which Charters was talking about his time in the 1950s when he was involved in writing about blues and jazz, traveling throughout the South looking for records and recording artists, collaborating with Moe Asche and Folkways Records, and also part of the revolutions of Bebop and Beat poetry.

Matthew Ismail: Through all this, of course -- I was just looking through your wife's Portable Kerouac (or whatever) the other day -- and I assume that you guys were involved with a lot of these folks, and they, of course, were all interested in jazz. Did that also play a part in this, or was it more like you were teaching them or something?

Samuel Charters: Well, we did have a period in the 60s -- but by this time things had settled down -- Allen Ginzberg would come over a lot and wanted us to play blues for him -- so we sort've helped with Allen's education with blues. But at that point we were all out in the Beat era, the whole Beat crowd. Annie was living in a cottage half a mile from where Allen was living in a cottage and Gary Snyder's cottage was about five blocks away. Annie, as you probably read in that book, dated Peter Orlovsky and went down and heard the first full reading of "Howl" in Berkeley. I was there with another girl and Annie was there with Peter Orlovsky! I had published my first book of poetry in '53 and then when I was living in San Francisco saving money to go to New Orleans my neighbors across the street were going to start a bookstore and I was doing credit checking for Dun and Bradstreet so I was given special permission to start a credit report on their efforts to start a bookstore even though it wasn't in my area, and that was City Lights Bookstore. I wrote the credit report that got them all their books! They had no money at all, Peter and everybody, we were all sort've scuffling along the same way.

You're probably getting a sense of what kind of community we were. We were all linked, and as I've said it wasn't only the blues. We were listening to Indian classical music, we were listening to Finnish music -- we were really into alternatives. The 50s was hard to deal with. And we really had to find some way that was different. We explored everything -- Charles Ives' music. We would have weekends in new York when we would simply open up the house . . . and anybody who wanted to play would simply write on the blackboard what piece they were going to play and we'd listen to it. It was a tiny community, we all knew each other, and we all shuffled between Greenwich Village, the French Quarter, and North Beach, and there was so much going on. Action painting was going on, and the involvement with jazz was so intense -- people don't realize that in San Francisco in the 40s the painters were all abstract expressionists -- they called it First Sensation -- a wonderful term, isn't it? -- and then the first figurative painting was a David Park painting -- they're all playing in a jazz band. It's a portrait from the piano of all the San Francisco artists playing in a jazz band! Albert Bischoff's playing trumpet! So, all of us who were playing jazz then -- I was playing four or five nights a week to make money -- and everyone was a part of it: the painters were a part of this, the poets were a part of this, everything was being published underground, we had no publishers. We were all circulating. We were all part of this thing that was going on, we had no idea what the results would be, but we were pursuing every aspect of it. The Boppers? Certainly, we recognized them, but it's hard to include New Orleans jazz and Bop.

MI: Did you have a sense of Bop in the late 40s?

CHARTERS: Oh absolutely. As I say, having been involved with jazz all my life, in the late 40s I was a 20 year-old professional jazz musician. I knew everything that was going on. One thing I really have to say is that Bop was really hard to play. It was really hard stuff. Whatever I thought about it, there was no way I could ever play it. This was hard to give up, because I really thought, if I found the right instrument -- clarinet wasn't right, and I'd switched to rhythm instruments -- I could have a meaningful jazz career. When I heard the Boppers, that was it! There was no way that I could perform what they were performing. They were just so good. They were scary . . . We were aware of it, we were aware of every tremor because there wasn't a hell of a lot going on.

MI: What does that mean? There's not a hell of a lot going on? You mean like the rest of the culture is producing --

CHARTERS: Absolutely! Jimmy Simms, Jo Stafford -- it was pretty white bread! It wasn't our reality. This happens in popular music often. What they had done describes perfectly the democratization of the society in the 20s [operatic style to a more chatty one] . . . A lot of things had happened, and I was born in 1929 and I grew up with this music. And I felt it defined -- and for a time it did, for the first twenty years of my life it did adequately define reality: the sexual relationships, the ambitions. Pop music we use as a way to define ourselves and as a way to exchange sexual information, what is expected in a relationship -- it's too crude to say 'sexual information' -- how to define the relationships we wish to have with the opposite sex. It's the most instantly communicable set of material we have. Pop music instantly conveys should you be jealous? should you not be jealous? You know, the questions are endlessly resolved in pop music, and that's where we get our answers more than anywhere else. And that's one reason why for the young people it's so crucial. For the first twenty years Bing Crosby did define that, and then suddenly in the 50s the world changed and the pop music didn't define it any more.

And we initially made a mistake: because initially we thought folk music would do it. The blues, we recognized, was not ours, and so we didn't dream of performing it. We could see it, we were conscious of it, but it was like Bach -- it was too distant; it came with too many different cultural attributes, even though we passionately loved it. In those days all we could do with guitars was strum the damn things! I remember I came to New York in 1958 and I would sit there with Van Rank who played guitar then and we sat together and tried to finger pick. And Dave could do it a little better than the rest of us -- but not much! We were all into strums and union songs because we were intensely political. The 50s was fought on the battle of politics, and so suddenly, when Bobby Dylan politicized it for us then it all fell in place. And then in the mid 60s it became possible to create a new pop music which would define the new social situation. That's why it took over, and that's why it continues to define what we do today.

MI: You know, when you think about the sort of society you were looking at and trying to think of alternatives to it in the US in the 50s, what was writing a book about blues going to help you do?

CHARTERS: Well, for me it is on two levels. First was a desire to play a role in public affairs -- and I studied at the University of International Relations for three years. The other level is that I ran afoul of the McCarthy committee, and I was declared disloyal in 1952 when I was in the Army, and transferred from my job at an Army newspaper to a front line ski unit where I spent some time in various holes at 58 degrees below zero waiting for Russians to attack. So, what I had hoped would be a public role, I hoped with the United Nations -- I studied, as I say, three years at the University of International Relations -- and when this happened, suddenly I could never even run for public office; I could never hold any government job. So I had been effectively removed from any sort of public role.

For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism. That's why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization: I wanted people to hear black music, as I said in The Poetry of the Blues, which was a tremendous best-seller, and is the most open and the most blatantly political of my books, and that's why I've never permitted it to be republished.

MI: Because you think the context is no longer appropriate?

CHARTERS: That's right. I mean, God, the Blackstone Rangers carried copies around in their back pockets  . . . It literally sold hundreds of thousands. It's where I say, you know, if by introducing music I can have somebody look across the racial divide and see a black face and see this person as a human being -- and that's why my work is unashamedly romantic. It absolutely destroyed any credibility I would ever have in the academy. I was often asked to lecture in the 60s, and I did give a series of lectures at Yale, seminars and things. I was offered many academic posts. When I did see that I was going to give my life to this, I did take some courses at the University of California in music theory and music history -- I was not a bumpkin who didn't know musically what I was talking about, and I always thought this was crucial. It may seem a round-about way to effect a revolution, but it was the only way I could do it. I'm not Allen Ginzberg! As Allen and I have found out many times. But the one time I really did set out -- there were many of us -- I set out to burn the White House! I did have burning materials in my pocket, I fought through police lines, and I was on national television, with this ring of busses surrounding the White House, and I was the only one who got far enough to see that on the lawn of the White House there were 3,000 troops with drawn bayonets.

MI: When was this?

CHARTERS: This was right after the Kent State killings. But while we were doing this, Allen was chanting for us, and the only sounds we could hear above the shouts of the police and the tear gas was the sound of Allen's voice. So, Allen did it his way, I did it mine. We were doing the same thing.

MI: So, in the aftermath of the problems with HUAC you were disabled. How did they justify this attack on you?

CHARTERS: I had been in Paris in 1948, as a teenager, and Communists attempted to take over the government -- there was armed fighting on the streets of Paris while I was there. So, I wrote dumb little amateur articles about this which appeared in the Sacramento Bee. And because I got so interested in it I went to the big rallies that Maurice Thorez was having before everybody hit the streets. I was actively anti-Communist because I was so disturbed by the Communist take-over in Czechoslovakia. I was really anti-Communist, but I was there at these rallies, and I did write these little, dumb letters, these articles, that the Sacramento Bee published saying I'd been there. And so you were asked when you came in the Army, asking whether you had ever been a member of, of had you ever attended a meeting, of the Communist Party. So I went to the officer and said something, and he just said "Just say yes and sign it." So I did! And then I was investigated, and it saved my life. The company I trained with was pulled back -- we did basic training 14 weeks, then we had a 30 day leave -- and they pulled them back after ten days and flew them directly to Korea and threw them into a battle against the Chinese, and with one exception they were all killed. I met the one sole survivor who'd been on buddy assignment with me -- I met him later.

They kept me as a semi-prisoner -- having no idea what was going on -- breaking rocks on the Presidio Military Compound in Monterey. And I was alone in the company area when the Sergeant called and said :"Hey Charters! All those guys? You know, they're all dead." I thought wow, had it not been for this political entanglement I'd be just as dead as they were. And I didn't find out about it until, as I say, a guy who was in college with me who was on assignment said "Hey, you're in trouble, I'm going to get you out of here. You want to go to Alaska?" I said 'Well, okay . . ."

So I was shipped with the Youth Representative of the American Socialist Party -- the two of us were put in with a black engineering company and shipped to Alaska. And I met my high school track coach there, who said "I'm going to put you on the post newspaper." Then I had to get a security clearance -- the newspaper came out once a week and I wrote about sports! For this, you had to get a security clearance . . . Then it all came out, and they marched me into a room full of Lt.-Colonels, sat me down, and said "Son, you've been accused of disloyalty --private charges of disloyalty, but you have to answer them." I sort've looked incredulous, said "What am I accused of?" and they said "That's secret material, we can't reveal that." [laughs] So then they then placed in my files -- after much fruitless talking -- they placed a letter in my files that said I'd been disloyal. Then I figured that once they'd done this to me, then I got involved with Folkways and everything, and said "Well, okay, I'll be disloyal!" [laughs] The first time I protested the Vietnam War I went down to Washington -- it was '65 -- and there were 30 of us. There were so few of us that this one leader told us all to kneel on the sidewalks, and we all kneeled on the sidewalks, and the FBI came and took close-up photos of us. Then the next time I went down, it was after Kent State, and there were 100,000 of us and I was going to burn the fucking White House down -- and then two months later I left the country. I just realized that the War was beginning to be too just -- I was either going to join the Weathermen . . . And I was 40 years old, I had a wife and child, and the Weathermen were not for me. So, I left the country instead. Without a regret in the world.