“People get more of a message from you than they do from an entertainer, and they believe in you. Now, you can say amen and forgive the sermon.” –Ralph Rinzler to Doc Watson, November 25, 1964. Archives Technician Rori Smith recently found a list sent to Ralph Rinzler from Doc Watson of all the Folkways albums Watson owned in 1963 and wrote a beautiful post about it. Rinzler archivists also put together your new favorite playlist to go along with it. Do you have a favorite track from Doc’s collection? Read more…
Stanley Jacobs, bandleader of Stanley and the Ten Sleepless
Knights, embraced quelbe music at a young age in the 1940s. “That’s all we
knew,” says the St. Croix musician about the historically overlooked but more
recently revered musical style of his homeland. For him, quelbe was music, and
music was quelbe.
‘Quelbe! Music of the U.S.
Virgin Islands’ (now available here) is the Smithsonian Folkways debut for this legendary group that
recently celebrated its 40th anniversary of continuing this old-yet-new dance
music. The album’s release is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s celebration
of Black History Month.
The primary ingredients for
quelbe music are call-and-response singing and drumming, accompanied by
African-influenced dance. Listeners will hear the squash (gourd rasp), steel
(triangle), flute, and banjo ukulele, in the contemporary trappings of electric
keyboard, drum set, conga, and electric bass. The all-new recordings are
accompanied by a 32-page booklet with photos and extensive notes by GRAMMY
winning producer Daniel Sheehy.
Among the standout tracks,
“Cigar Win The Race” is a rollicking song that fully embodies the spirit of
quelbe. “Sly Mongoose” has a relaxed backbeat, and “When You Had Me” has a
melody as cheeky as its lyrics, which tell the tale of a fickle former flame.
When Stanley and his Ten
Sleepless Knights formed in the early 1970s, quelbe was largely overshadowed by
more commercially glamorous styles of music from the United States and other
Caribbean islands. Class-based notions of propriety and superiority inflicted
themselves on views of lifestyles associated with local, rural people of humble
means. Quelbe music was thought by some to be scandalous. The lyrics of quelbe
songs often contained sexual innuendo and double entendre, telling stories of
clandestine sexual trysts and other lewd behavior. Few people would have
guessed how much the genre would climb the social ladder in the Virgin Islands
over the next four decades as the Virgin Islands focused on instilling the
cultural heritage.
In 2003, the Virgin Islands
legislature passed a bill officially making quelbe “the vocal and instrumental
style of Virgin Islands.” Then in 2010, the band, whose members include a
psychiatrist, a firefighter, an international basketball referee, and a
racehorse owner, became recognized as its chief protagonists. It was a victory
for a genre of traditional music that had once been snubbed, but is now
celebrated.