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,[...]

In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. During her stay she heard the sing[...]

The popularity of the American musical form is illustrated in an account of its origins and development that emphasizes its relation to the lives and culture of black performers[...]

Samuel Charters belongs to a small group of writers about music whose work has transformed their -subject-without his discoveries, insights and interventions, the history of blues over the past 50 years would have been very different. This book is a -collection of his writings from 1954 to 2004.Samu[...]