The Bahamas: Islands of Song.

• Author: Holston, Mark

(Smithsonian Folkways SF CD 40405)

The survival and perpetuation of an indigenous music tradition in the Bahamas is a tribute to the small nation's resilient culture. Bahamians have successfully combined elements of their predominantly African and British heritage and the tradition of antebellum slave songs of the U.S. South with their long-established knack for storytelling into an identifiable national style.

This collection of twenty-three tracks, performed by local nonprofessional singers and instrumentalists, draws its inspiration from the tradition of religious folk songs based on Baptist and Wesleyan hymnals and local customs and observances that have evolved since the archipelago was permanently inhabited by Britons and African slaves in the mid-1600s.

Some songs draw their lyrics from such historical events as a bumper watermelon crop in the 1920s, celebrated in "Watermelon Is Spoilin' on the Vine." Others, like the wistful "Roll of Pin," owe their existence to a manner of song-based courtship popular in the colonial era. Many tracks feature vocal groups of various...