Charles Frederic Ramsey, Jr. (January 29, 1915 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – March 18, 1995 in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest City (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.jazz and record producer. Ramsey took his BA at Princeton University in 1936, then took jobs at Harcourt Brace (1936–39), the United States Department of Agriculture (1941–42), and Voice of America (1942). With Charles Edward Smith, Ramsey wrote ''

Jazzmen ''Jazzmen'' is a book on the history of jazz. It was edited by Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, and was published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1939. It was the first jazz history book published in the United States, and helped ...

'' (1939), an early landmark of jazz scholarship particularly noted for its treatment of the life of King Oliver. After receiving

Guggenheim fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

s, he visited the

American South The Southern United States (sometimes Dixie, also referred to as the Southern States, the American South, the Southland, or simply the South) is a geographic and cultural region of the United States of America. It is between the Atlantic Ocean ...

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 Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways. History The Folkways Records & Service ...

and in a 1957 documentary, ''Music of the South''. He also curated an

anthology In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term ''anthology'' typically categ ...

of early jazz recordings for Folkways, entitled simply ''Jazz''. Ramsey was a staff member of '' The Saturday Review'' from 1949 through 1961. He 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 in 1974–75 and continued with a Ford Foundation grant in 1975–76. He presented early jazz interviews on National Public Radio in 1987.

Books

*'' Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It'' (1939) *''The Jazz Record Book'' (1942) *''Chicago Documentary: Portrait of a Jazz Era'' (1944) *''A Guide to Longplay Jazz Records'' (1954) *''Been Here and Gone'' (1960) *''Where the Music Started: A Photographic Essay'' (1970)

References

External links

Frederic Ramsey Jr. Papers
a
The Historic New Orleans Collection
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ramsey, Fred 1915 births 1995 deaths American music critics Record producers from Pennsylvania 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American musicologists