Samuel Charters, who died in 2015, was a novelist, poet and eminent historian of jazz and the blues. His 1959 book The Country Blues was the first serious examination of this seedbed of virtually all American music.
His books include The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, Jelly Roll Morton’s Last Night at the Jungle Inn, The Legacy of the Blues: The Art and Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen, New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus, The Day is so Long and the Wages so Small: Music on a Summer Island and the novel Louisiana Black.