Blues Faces: Celebrating the Work of Sam & Ann Charters

(cont'd)

Also, the Charters have a longstanding relationship with UConn. Ann, the well-known Beat Generation scholar, has been a professor there for 25 years and the Benton Museum on campus was the first to exhibit the photographs the Charters had taken over the years of the blues legends they'd sought out and recorded. Not coincidentally, the night was also a celebration of the publication of Ann's pictures, along with Sam's more recent photos of African griots, in Blues Faces. Blues Faces is a handsome, haunting book, and the Charters have captured something of the individual spirit of each of the musicians they photographed. A wan Skip James recedes into a wash of shadows, a robust Muddy Waters smiles graciously, nattily dressed and coiffed on the street. Sleepy John Estes and his wife look frail and tired on the porch of a ramshackle shack, many years after rumor had it that he was dead - but not quite too many. Pink Anderson poses with his young son, who holds his own small guitar.

Tony Seeger was also there. Having headed the Smithsonian/Folkways collection for the past twelve years, he told me he has returned this fall to his academic career as an ethnomusicologist, trading Washington DC for a teaching post in California. Among the projects he accomplished during his tenure at the Smithsonian was the acquisition of the Fast Folk Musical Magazine. His final achievement is the new anthology of songs from Broadsides, a historic publication that brought many great political songs to light from the 50s through the 80s.

Cephas and Wiggins delighted the audience at Jorgensen Auditorium with their renditions of Piedmont blues classics, including the archetypal badman song, Stackolee. The concert was almost a lecture/demonstration, with John Cephas talking about the range of blues subjects and explaining the origins of some of the songs. He also demonstrated the differences between the Piedmont and delta blues guitar styles (Piedmont consists of fingerpicking with an alternating bass - a sound made famous by John Hurt - while delta blues is mainly a single string style accented with strummed chords. The high point of their set was Phil Wiggins' original song, "Fool's Night Out" - a celebration of full moon shenanigans that got the audience singing along. Cephas and Wiggins were great guys, but I got the feeling that they were presenting the blues to the audience more than playing them.

The concert really got going, though, when Otis Rush came on. For years - decades - Rush has played in the shadow of electric blues greats like B.B. King. Charters' inclusion of five of his tracks on The Chicago Blues Today gave his career a boost in the 60s and the current resurgence of in blues has gotten him out of retirement, but he still gets little of the recognition he deserves. From what I heard, he ranks with the best. Backed by a loose but driving and charismatic band, Rush shifted gears. Now 66, decked out in a cowboy hat and wielding a big red Gibson, he looked like electric blues - and he was definitely playing them. When it came to "All of Your Love," the band shifted from the calypso beat of the song to a sharp shuffle, going back and forth, playing the different energies of the rhythms off each other.

Listening to the long overlooked Otis Rush, the picture of cool while his fingers worked over the guitar and made it wail, I kept thinking about what Sam Charters had said earlier. Someone at had asked about the blues today, where to find them. His answer was - you have to look wider. In ska, reggae, rock and especially rap. Many fine, talented musicians still play in that style - Taj Mahal for one - but the blues, the artform he knew and loved, is gone. Not dead, but transformed.

Charters himself has followed the blues wherever it leads - to the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and to Africa - to Zimbabwe where he has found guitarists working in pairs in a way that emulates the 20-stringed kora. He doesn't mourn for the blues. He still hears the sound, that indescribable something, and wherever he hears it, he captures some of it on tape to bring to us, and then teaches us how to listen.

Sam Charters directs Gazell Records from his home in Storrs, CT, reissuing recordings from defunct labels like Chess, as well as new recordings by artists like Dave Van Ronk and singer-songwriter Frank Christian.

Keep in touch,

Hugh Blumenfeld,
Editor

back to page -> 1

Hugh Blumenfeld, Editor
hugh@balladtree.com