Samuel Charters piloted much of the 1960s blues revival in America, navigating a story line of the blues for a fascinated new audience through his extensive writings and record productions. Charters, born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 1, 1929, began his music chronicling with New Orleans jazz, publishing an index to Crescent City jazz artists under the name Samuel Barclay Charters IV. Blues soon became his focus, and he began doing field recordings in 1955, searching out both the surviving elder statesmen and younger undiscovered talent, gathering their stories as well as their music. His Country Blues (1959) was a landmark book, pulling together the threads of blues history in both a musical and cultural context. It was, in his words, “an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help” for the blues artists. Charters remained a leading figure in blues documentation and recording, producing albums for Folkways, Vanguard, Prestige/Bluesville, Sonet, and other labels, ranging from traditional Piedmont and Memphis blues to the eye-opening Chicago/The Blues/Today! set of electric Chicago blues, and publishing more books on blues and jazz, along with works of fiction and poetry. Disenchanted with U.S. politics during the Vietnam war, Charters moved to Sweden in 1971 and later began dividing his time between Sweden and Connecticut, where the University of Connecticut now houses the Samuel and Ann Charters Archive of Blues and Vernacular African American Musical Culture.
