Music In The Bahamas

The Music and the People of the Bahamas

The first known people to inhabit some of the 700 islands that make up the Bahamas, were the Taíno Arawak people who called themselves the Lukku-Cairi (island people). Somewhere between 300 and 400 CE archeological evidence shows that this group of people migrated from the shores of the Orinoco River in what is now Venezuela to Cuba and then the Bahamas. The Lukku-Cairi were a peaceful people. (Murray, 1999, p.10) Their peacefulness and generosity are written about by Christopher Columbus the diary of his first voyage to the new world. They had the misfortune of being the first people Christopher Columbus and his crew met in 1492. Columbus enslaved the Lukku-Cairi took them to Hispaniola and in the

"The religious ceremonies that took place at gatherings and festivals were accompanied by music and dance. In the arieto people would sing and dance, in a circle with their arms intertwined, to the sound of a drum. One member, either a man or a woman, guided the group" (Sanjuro, 1986).
After being “empty” for almost 100 years the Bahamas next wave of inhabitants arrived in 1647. The English began arriving from Bermuda, as tensions rose in England over religious freedom and their civil war. William Sayle petitioned the British government on behalf of his company the Eleutherian Adventurers for the island that would become Eleuthera.
The next wave of inhabitants came in the form of British loyalist who fled the United States after the War of Independence. They began arriving, along with large number of enslaved Africans. The slave trade to the Bahamas would continue until 1838 when emancipation became legal. By 1818 enslaved people were no longer allowed to be newly brought to the Bahamas. The freedom in the Bahamas and its close proximity to Florida, also meant that many people including indentured Europeans, Seminoles and slaves escaped to the

“You will find in our service a number of outside influences within the same service. You will find European influence where we will sing hymns. American influence where the choir will sing a Negro spiritual or a Black gospel song. And you will find the Bahamian flavor where we sing one of our old anthems (religious hymns) or one of our rhyming spirituals – all a part of the same worship experience.”
Sacred music has played a powerful role in Bahamian society. Some of the music uses the particular Bahamian flair for story telling by singing rhyming versus with a back-up chorus. The rhymer sings a story often improvised, based on the bible, actual events or imagined, in up to twelve versus and the chorus repeats the same refrain afterwards. Here is an excerpt from Run, Come, See Jerusalem, by the Blind Blake & Calypsonians, a song about the 1929 hurricane that sunk three boats.
It was in nineteen hundred and twenty-nine
Run come see, I remember that day pretty well
Nineteen hundred and