ALBUM: ‘Music for Work and Play: Carriacou, Grenada, 1962’ (Recorded by Alan Lomax)
Carriacou is a tiny island in the Eastern Caribbean near Grenada, with an area of 13 square miles and a population of 8,000 people. Nevertheless, its small size disguises the richness of its unique musical tradition. First colonized by the French in the Seventeenth century, Carriacou became a British settlement in 1763, and enslaved peoples from West Africa were brought to Carriacou to work on the sugar and cotton plantations. The European influence of its colonial era blended with the African roots of the vast majority of the population, creating the island’s distinctive culture. Even among the larger and more prominent islands of the West Indies, Carriacou’s musical heritage stands out. Robert Wyndham Nicholls writes in The Jumbies’ Playing Ground: Old World Influences on Afro-Creole Masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean that “because of its remote location, small size, and high proportion of blacks, Carriacou maintained nation dances longer than did other islands.”
In the summer of 1962, famed folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, accompanied by his teenaged daughter Anna, spent five days in Carriacou as part of a field recording mission in the Lesser Antilles. The purpose of Lomax’s trip was not strictly musical and anthropological, but political as well. At the time, Great Britain’s colonies in the West Indies were attempting to gain independence. Lomax’s mission was to delineate a shared cultural identity among the islands, in order to encourage a the creation of a unified West Indian nation state. Lomax’s timing proved to be invaluable, preserving Carriacou’s musical identity just as increased globalization and emigration to the UK and US threatened to render it extinct.
Now, on the centenary of Lomax’s birth, 33 of his field recordings on that island have been reissued as the digital-only album Music for Work and Play: Carriacou, Grenada, 1962 by Global Jukebox Records, the imprint affiliated with the Lomax-founded Association for Cultural Equity. Compiled by Dr. Rebecca S. Miller of Hampshire College, who also wrote the highly informative liner notes, the collection spans dance tunes, sea chanteys, calypsos, and ceremonial songs, as well as snippets of interviews between Lomax and Carriacouan musicians. These tracks show a fascinating cultural mishmash: folk melodies imported by Scottish and Irish immigrants are reworked to emphasize rhythm and repetition, while West African-inspired call-and-response vocals are tied into song structures drawn from European dances.
One of the most crucial musical traditions that Lomax documented was the ritual dance known as Big Drum, a ceremony that pays homage to Carriacouans’ ancestors. The style features three drums: two lower-pitched boulas playing the rhythm, and a higher cut drum taking the lead, with a variety of other percussion (including hoe blades) fleshing out the sound. At the time of Lomax’s visit to the island, the knowledge of Big Drum was largely confined to Carriacou’s middle-aged and elderly population. There has been a revival of interest in recent years; however, the younger players (such as Winston Fleary) learned the style not through oral tradition, but via recordings by Lomax and other ethnomusicologists.
The other major distinct Carriacouan genre is the quadrille, combining the European group dance style of the same name, popular in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, with African-influenced polyrhythms and microtones (pitches slightly sharper or flatter than the notes of the Western musical scale). The six-part quadrille is led by a violinist, who often plays in triplets, while the percussion (drum, tambourine, triangle) drives the beat in the steadier 2/4 time. Despite Carriacou’s small size, there are regional variations on the quadrille native to different parts of the island. This compilation features both the loose, joyous iteration recorded in the village of L’Esterre, as well as the more restrained, slower version from Windward, a community with more ingrained Irish and Scottish influences. (According to his personal notes, Lomax far preferred the L’Esterre style, dismissing Windward’s as “interesting because of stiffness, a lack of rhythmic interest, out of tune-ness.” The sample below is from a L’Esterre quadrille.)
A specific type of dance music that recurs throughout the compilation is the “pass-play,” a game played by unmarried youngsters. Participants take turns dancing in a ring while engaging in a call-and-response vocal exchange. (Quadrilles, in contrast, are nearly always instrumental.) Songs such as “Meet Me on the Road” and “Waterloo, My Boy, Turn Me Round,” recorded by Lomax in the village of La Resource, are some of the catchiest and most lighthearted on Music for Work and Play, befitting a soundtrack to a game played by teenagers.
Being an island country, seafaring and boatbuilding historically constituted the bulk of the industry in Carriacou. Naturally, sea chanteys are another recurring component of the compilation, putting the “work” into Music for Work and Play. Carriacouan sailors would sing songs such as “Rosibella” and “Shame, Shame, Shame, Unc’ Riley” to pass the time and to coordinate their work efforts, while a chantey like the aching “It Time for a Man to Go” expresses the loneliness of being at sea. (One of the most amusing interview snippets included on the compilation finds Lomax asking former sailor Newton Joseph if he’s heard of a chantey called “Amsterdam”; Joseph responds that he has, through “a mister just like you,” fellow music folklorist Andrew C. Pearse.)
When Lomax returned to the island in 1991, he found Carriacou greatly changed from what it had been only 30 years earlier. Pass-plays and quadrilles, already in decline during his previous visit, were performed even less frequently, and tourism and real estate had largely overtaken seafaring as the island’s primary industries. Canute Caliste, the L’Esterre violinist who played on the quadrilles recorded by Lomax in 1962, had since become a world-renowned naïve artist, although he still lived on the island and still played violin. The 1991 visit would become Lomax’s last-ever field recording trip. While his Carriacou tapes may not be as famous as the recordings of British folk and American blues that established his career, Lomax played a key role in preserving such vital Carriacouan traditions as Big Drum and quadrille violin before they were lost forever.
To get your download of Music for Work and Play, head over to globaljukeboxrecords.com.
