Samuel Charters - The Poetry of the Blues

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Oak Publications, Inc., New York, in 1963.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Charters, Samuel, 19292015, author. | Charters, Ann, illustrator.

Title: The poetry of the blues / Samuel Charters ; photographs by Ann Charters.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2019. | This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Oak Publications, Inc., New York, in 1963. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049946 | ISBN 978-0-4868-3295-1| ISBN 0486832953

Subjects: LCSH: American poetryAfrican American authorsHistory and criticism. | African AmericansIntellectual life. | African Americans in literature. | Blues (Music)Texts.

Classification: LCC PS591.N4 C4 2019 | DDC 811.009/896073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049946

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

83295301 2019

www.doverpublications.com

For Frederick Usher Jr.

When I think of friendship I remember

paths weve walked together by the sea,

at the narrowing of the spit of sand,

the crusted rocks thrusting toward the spray,

our steps so mingled I couldnt tell

the print of your foot from mine.

INTRODUCTION

In one of his essays James Baldwin describes an African writer rising to defend his insistence on the importance of an African culture. What we are doing is holding on to what is ours. Little, he added sardonically but it belongs to us. Because the blues is a mingled expression of the life of the Negro in another continent he might prefer to ignore it, but the blues does belong to the Negro, and in both range and depth it is a great body of folk poetry. The poetic achievement of the blues is in many ways unique, and if it is still little known this is another aspect of the same social discriminations that have forced it into being. Baldwin himself learned, in Europe, that it is the blues which were at the heart of his own identity as an American Negro, an identity which he tried unsuccessfully to reject. In his essay, The Discovery Of What It Means To Be An American, he wrote,

In Switzerland... armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter, I began to try to re-create the life that I had first known as a child and from which I had spent so many years in flight.

It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep. I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that for years I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a nigger.

For many Negroes in America, as it was for James Baldwin, it will be emotionally necessary to reject their background, but always in the blues they will find again the memory of the life they have left behind. As I wrote I thought more often of these men and women than I did of anyone else who might be interested in the poetic expression of the blues. If I seem, at times, to be insistent on emphasizing the ugly reality of American racial discrimination it is because I think of it as the dominant moral issue facing American society today, and if I sometimes seem to have a personal emotional involvement in the blues it is because the reality of the blues is not too different from the reality of the life of any of us living in the United States in these troubling years.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The work songs from which much of the blues has been derived were like seeds scattered across the southern landscape. Wherever they strayed the blues sprang up after them and as a man sang the blues he scattered the material farther, until the blues became a nearly communal expression of the Negro in America. Most of the verses of the blues are used by every singer, and they have become the root language for the more personal singers like John Estes and Robert Johnson. I have not mentioned a particular singer as the source for these verses; since this would tend to imply that there is someone who could be thought of as having written them. The best singers, however, often developed a group of verses which became their personal material, and if the verse seemed to be related to one singer I have mentioned his name. Often the verses are used in two or three blues; since the blues is a pliant idiom, so I have not used a title with the verse. I have tried to suggest some of the casualness of blues composition by following the singers own use of the verse. In those blues which have become a personal poetry I have generally mentioned both the singer and the title he has given to his song.

In the summer of 1962 I talked again with many of the blues singers that Ive worked with in recent years, and their comments and suggestions on the nature of the blues were invaluable. If there is a difference between the verses on their recordings and the verses I have used in the text then the text version uses unreleased material from my collection. I would like to express my most sincere thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Townsend and Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Short, of St. Louis; to John Estes and Philip Meux of Brownsville, Tennessee; to Gus Cannon and Furry Lewis of Memphis; and Mr. and Mrs. Pink Anderson and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Tate of Spartanburg, South Carolina, for their generous help. I would especially like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Willie Borum of Memphis for their friendship and hospitality during my trips to their city.

Samuel Charters

New London,

New Hampshire.

November, 1962

I n some of the larger cities of the American South there are still signs reading White Only painted on the doorways or windows of restaurants and laundries. Dingy clapboard barrooms have painted arrows, usually part of the advertising on the building front, reading Colored Entrance, the arrow pointing to a back door or to a service window in the side of the building. At hospital entrances there are ornate metal letters reading Out Patient Dispensary - Colored and Out Patient Dispensary - White. The doors are separate. In the smaller towns there usually arent so many signs; except for the benches under the shade of an overhanging store marquee or at a bus stop. Someone who didnt know the town well, someone perhaps in from a nearby farm for some shopping, might get the benches confused. Sometimes drinking fountains are marked, and gasoline station rest rooms, but there usually isnt much need for signs; since the townspeople, white and colored, know every street and every store front and every foot of pavement, and their own place on it. If someone stops in the town hes expected to look around and find where the color line has been drawn. In northern cities the line is less definite, and the emotional response is less intense if the line is crossed, but within every neighborhood some blocks are colored and others white. Even with an increased range of employment opening more and more to young colored men and women, with neighborhood restrictions being slowly pushed aside, and with educational opportunities steadily increasing, the line, despite its seeming vagueness and lack of official sanction, is still tightly drawn. The life of the Negro and the life of his white neighbor is still separate and apart, and despite recent social progress will remain separate for many years to come.