Charters, Ann.

For nearly the last 50 years, Samuel Charters has been discovering and documenting African American music. Starting as a field recorder for Folkways Records in 1954, Sam Charters has also served as recording director for Prestige and Vanguard Records, producer for Sonet Records and is the owner of Gazell Records . A prolific writer and poet, Charters has published many books about the blues and accounts of the lives of musicians who played the blues. In the field, he often collaborated with his wife Ann, who is a writer, literary scholar, photographer and pianist in her own right. Their quest to document African American music has taken them to St. Louis, Memphis, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, the Caribbean and as far as Africa . In these places, the Charters have tried to record music that they believed was going to be lost. Their efforts to preserve and share the songs that they heard on their travels have culminated in a working archive that provides researchers with a complete experience of African American vernacular music.

Ann Charters was born 10 November 1936, in Bridgeport, CT, the daughter of Nathan (a contractor) and Kate (Schultz) Danberg. She attended the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1957) and Columbia University (M.A., 1959, Ph.D., 1965). Charters career has included teaching creative writing at Colby Junior College, New London, NH (1961-63), working as an assistant editor at Random House-Knopf (1965) and continuing as an educator at Columbia University (instructor in literature, 1965-66), New York City Community College of Applied Arts and Sciences of the City University of New York (assistant professor of English (1967-70) and University of Connecticut (associate professor, 1974-81, professor of English, 1981-). She has been awarded fellowships from Columbia University (1958-59, 1963-64, 1965-66) and grants from the University of Connecticut (1975-76, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1986). Charters is a member of International PEN and Phi Beta Kappa .

Educator, biographer.