The Roots Of The Blues: An African Search

by Penguin Adult HC/TR

Book by Charters, Samuel Barclay

Genres: Music

151 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1981

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant little book loaded with insights about music, travel, and the challenge of communicating across cultures. Sam Charters recounts his 1973 research trip to West Africa in a deadpan style that makes me think the story would make a good Jim Jarmusch movie.

As the title implies, Charters's intent was to study the origins of American country blues in the traditional music of West Africa. Charters had published several important books on country blues and produced recordings by Lightnin' Hopkins and other blues performers. Before leaving for Africa, he did his homework - he seems to have read every European traveler's account, going back centuries, of the Gambia River region to which he was headed, along with everything he could find about the area's music and the slave trade that brought Africans to America. At the same time, he was careful to leave the larger part of his education to the journey itself:

As I traveled I had a definite idea of where I wanted to go, but at the same time I hadn't planned the trip in any way. There are two ways to travel: one with a clear and detailed itinerary and the other with simply the willingness to follow suggestions and ideas. I've always felt that to plan a trip too carefully is to make sure you won't find out anything you don't already know

In The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Mali, Charters encounters traditional music plausibly related to American blues, but not in any way a casual listener would recognize, as well as artifacts of transatlantic history.

'So what have you learned now?'
'About what?'
'About the things you came to find out. About the songs of the jali and the old days and the time of the slaves.'
I shook my head. 'I don't know. When I came I thought I knew so much.' Then I asked suddenly, 'What about you? You never say what you think of the old days the jali sings about.
Musa shrugged.
'We don't think about that so much, that's the truth. It was so long ago. It isn't only you who wants to know. Sometimes we meet Americans, black people who come from Africa, and they try to talk to us about it. But what can I tell them? I can only tell them what I know as a Fula.'

If you work too much with ethnic music as a field of study you forget that it has a completely different reality to people who have grown up with it. They don't hear it as a cultural artifact. They hear it in terms of the person performing it; they hear it as personal and individual. It is so much part of their own memory and cultural habits that they are often much more interested in variety or change than the outsider studying the music, who wants to fix it at some point of time in the society's development. Ironically, the most dishonest thing a field collector does is collect - since he brings back only objects or examples, and to present them by themselves is to strip them of the associations that someone within the culture brings to them.

A long journey functions on many levels of reality and response - but there is so much to it that's simply mechanical that on one level it has some of the characteristics of a large, unwieldy machine that has to be constantly tinkered with.