Sam Charters’ groundbreaking research on the blues in the 1950s and ’60s resulted in several books that helped fuel the blues revival, bringing to light a musical and cultural history that no previous books had documented in such detail. Charters compiled The Bluesmen, subtitled ‘The story and the music of the men who made the Blues,’ with the intention of revising and expanding his 1959 opus, The Country Blues. A wealth of new information had been gathered in the interim by a network of researchers who shared their discoveries with Charters. The Bluesmen, published in 1967 by Oak Publications in New York, offered chapters on ‘The African Background,’ Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, with biographical sections devoted to Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and other key figures; Charters decided to save Memphis, St. Louis, the Atlantic Coast, postwar blues, the women of the blues, and other topics for future volumes. Some of this eventually appeared in Sweet As the Showers of Rain (The Bluesmen, Volume II) in 1977 and some appeared in various collections and in album liner notes over the years. In 1991, Da Capo Press combined the two volumes of The Bluesmen into a handy treatise that still serves as an invaluable reference work even after the decades of scholarship and analysis that have followed in the wake of Charters’ visionary studies.
