The WPA guide to 1930s Arkansas Book

This may be the best book I've ever read about fieldwork. Charters is a seminal writer on black American music, especially the blues, and undertook some pretty impressive work in his career. But this book is the account of a calmer time in his life, as he travels to the Bahamas in 1958 looking for a place to lie low with his new partner, Anne. Their time on the island is a hazy dream of early love and slow-time fieldwork. Charters was a poet too, so his prose sparkles like sun on the ocean. While there, they discovered the legendary guitarist Joseph Spence and other great artists, but it's less the story of a dogged anthropologist and more the story of two people's immersion in a strange and beautifully alien (to them) world. His description of the music he finds is wonderfully rendered, and his obvious love for the island and the characters he meets is molded of the same clay as his descriptions of falling deeper in love with his soon-to-be wife. It's a beautiful book.