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Bahamas

Nassau nightclub soul, late 1960s

Wendell Stuart

Wendell Stuart led the Downbeaters through Nassau's nightclub circuit in the late 1960s, with guitarist Solomon Frazier, bassist Patrick Capron, and drummer Erskine Bain behind him. They played a Bahamian blend of soul, calypso, and reggae that rarely traveled far beyond the islands at the time. Their 1969 self-titled album was pressed locally, on the Nassau label Elite Records. Records like this stayed largely unknown outside the Bahamas for decades, until crate-diggers and reissue labels started tracking down surviving copies.

The Bahamas' most imitated guitarist

Joseph Spence

Joseph Spence, born in 1910 in the Androsian settlement of Small Hope, developed a fingerstyle guitar technique odd enough that Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal each traveled to Nassau just to sit with him and learn. He played melody, bass line, and harmony at once, humming and half-singing over the top, in a style that's been compared to Thelonious Monk's harmonic left turns. Recordings he made in 1965, on his first trip to the United States, stayed unreleased for over half a century before finally surfacing on Smithsonian Folkways' 2021 archival album Encore. He died in Nassau in 1984. He changed how a generation of folk guitarists thought about the instrument, and he hardly ever left the Bahamas to do it.

Cat Island's self-styled Obeah Man

Exuma

Tony McKay, born on Cat Island, moved to New York to study architecture and then reinvented himself as Exuma. He wrapped junkanoo rhythms and calypso in a mystical, theatrical persona he called the Obeah Man, which he insisted referred to a genuine Bahamian folk-healing tradition and not the "voodoo" cliché critics reached for. His 1970 debut album, sometimes titled The Obeah Man, drew on Haitian Vodou as well as Bahamian folk belief. Nina Simone became an unlikely champion, covering and reworking his songs on her own records, so the music got further than his fairly small discography might suggest.

The Collection