Reviews for The day is so long and the wages so small

The average rating for The day is so long and the wages so small based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-12-26 00:00:00 Gareth Hoffman I don't remember how I came across this book, but a few years ago I was attempting to create a list of books set in more international locales than those toward which I normally tend to gravitate - US/Western Europe. This slim title, obtained all the way from Maine for me by my library system, is a gem. I don't know much about folk or blues music, but while that is the main reason FOR this book, it's not necessary to have that knowledge to enjoy it. Samuel Charters (along with the woman who would later become his wife, Ann) travel to Andros, one of the lesser-known Bahamian islands, in the summer of 1958, searching for the origin of a song that has been haunting Samuel since he heard it months earlier. Charters' prose is very vivid and takes the reader along to the little settlements they visit; you can smell the sea and the sand, and feel the heat burnishing your skin along with them as they evade sharks, fish for their dinners, and meet a bevy of musical folk descended from African slaves who were abandoned on the island long ago. If you're a fan of music, brief memoirs, or travelogues, you will probably find something to like in this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-30 00:00:00 Mary Macleod 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.