USA Folk Music on Records: The Alan Lomax Collection. Caribbean Voyage; Brown Girl in the Ring

The Caribbean islands have plenty of native traditions, but the islands were visited or invaded by English, French, and Spanish marauders often enough to have ended up with a corpus of song that draws freely on the influences of these European countries. Then there was the slave trade that brought with it African traditions, and somewhere in this melting pot there emerged an identifiable Creole culture. This mix is reflected in the 62 tracks on this CD of songs from Trinidad, Tobago, Dominica, St Lucia, Anguilla, Nevis, and Carriacou. Although there’s a smattering of adult singing, most of these are...