In A Language of Song, Samuel Charters one of the pioneering collectors of African American music writes of a trip to West Africa where he found a gathering of cultures and a continuing history that lay behind the flood of musical expression he] encountered everywhere . . . from Brazil to Cuba, to Trinidad, to New Orleans, to the Bahamas, to dance halls of west Louisiana and the great churches of Harlem. In this book, Charters takes readers along to those and other places, including Jamaica and the Georgia Sea Islands, as he recounts experiences from a half-century spent following,...