Samuel Barclay Charters IV (August 1, 1929 – March 18, 2015) was an American music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet.
[1][2] Charters was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into an upper-middle-class family that was interested in listening to and playing music of all sorts.
After completing military service during the Korean War, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1956.
[citation needed] In the 1940s and 1950s, though he was mostly immersed in studying and playing jazz, Charters also purchased numerous old recordings of American blues musicians.
He eventually amassed a huge and valuable collection and beginning to understand that blues and jazz were connected in the history of black music.
In 1950 he boarded a Greyhound bus in Sacramento, California, bound for New Orleans, where he sought jazz clarinet lessons with the great George Lewis.
He served for two years in the United States Army (1951–53) and began to study jazz clarinet with George Lewis.
That's why my work is not academic, that is why it is absolutely nothing but popularization: I wanted people to hear black music, as I said in The Poetry of the Blues.
It's where I say, you know, if by introducing music I can have somebody look across the racial divide and see a black face and see this person as a human being—and that's why my work is unashamedly romantic"[3]: 251–52 ).
After disappearing for many years, the film reappeared in a package entitled Searching for Secret Heros, created and distributed by Document Records in 2020.
[citation needed] Charters's writings have been influential, bringing to light aspects of African-American music and culture that had previously been largely unknown to the general public, as well as publishing poetry and novels.
[citation needed] He became disenchanted with American politics during the Vietnam War and moved with his family to Sweden, establishing a new life there despite not being able to speak the language at first.
The archive contains materials collected during the couple's decades of work documenting and preserving African-American music throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.
In 2014, he published The Harry Bright Dances, a short work of fiction, which he described as "a fable"; Things to Do Around Picadilly; and What Paths, What Journeys: New and Selected Poems.
That year he and his wife also established the Sam and Ann Charters Collection of Swedish Art at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.
Charters died at his home in Årsta, Stockholm, Sweden, on March 18, 2015, of myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of bone marrow cancer.