Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Frederic Ramsey, Jr. was born on January 29, 1915 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Taking his BA at Princeton University in 1936, then went to work at Harcourt Brace in the late Thirties. The early Forties had him at the United States Department of Agriculture and Voice of America.
With Charles Edward Smith, Ramsey wrote Jazzmen in 1939, an early landmark of jazz scholarship particularly noted for its treatment of the life of King Oliver. After receiving Guggenheim fellowships, he visited the American South in the middle of the 1950s to make field recordings and do interviews with rural musicians, some of which were used in releases by Folkways Records and in a 1957 documentary, Music of the South.
He curated an anthology of early jazz recordings for Folkways, titled simply Jazz. Ramsey worked with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University from 1970. He researched Buddy Bolden’s life with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and continued with a Ford Foundation grant. He presented early jazz interviews on National Public Radio in 1987. The writer of jazz and record producer Charles Ramsey passed away on March 18, 1995 in Paterson, New Jersey.
