by Larry Smith
Last week I took a trip on the underground railroad of Bahamian music. Man, I was walking in Jerusalem just like John. I saw a number of signs, and all the guides remembered quite well. And sometimes, they even had fire and brimstone coming out of their mouth.
We embarked at the Doongalik station on Village Road. Jackson Burnside and Charles Carter were the conductors on a fascinating journey to excavate the memory of two great Bahamian musicians - the idiosyncratic guitarist Joseph Spence (who would have been 100 this year) and the obeah man Tony McKay (whose first album appeared 40 years ago, when Tough Call was a yoot-man).
One of the guides on this trip was 79-year-old Geneva Pinder. She described her Uncle Youngie as "the sweetest man...sitting with his pipe and singing with my parents. My grandmother was a Sunday school teacher on Andros and we had to sing from when we were little. My mom wasn't that learned, but she could rhyme."
Geneva's mother, Edith, was the sister of Joseph Spence, who died in 1984. And it was her rhyming - a musical form sometimes described as an ancestor of rap - that attracted the American folk artist Jody Stecher to Nassau in 1965, where he recorded Spence and the Pinder family in their Culmersville yard.
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Bring Home Bahamian Talent
by Simon
The Bahamas has various agencies dedicated to attracting overseas investments, including the Bahamas Maritime Authority which recently opened its third overseas office. Today, the country enjoys one of the more successful international ship registries. That success is measured by both gross tonnage and attention to high international standards.
Our diplomatic missions also promote The Bahamas as an attractive destination for international business and foreign capital. However, the country’s lead investment arm is The Bahamas Investment Authority. Its website notes:
“The proactive economic growth and development policies of the government of the Bahamas are guided by The Bahamas Investment Authority (BIA), established to "cut red tape and lay out the red carpet" for investors. Operating from the Office of the Prime Minister, the BIA has been designated as a "one-stop shop" designed to simplify investing in The Bahamas.”
The attraction of such capital is essential to economic growth. So too is the cultivation of another source of capital. Just as foreign direct investment is critical to national development, so is tapping into a wealth of Bahamian talent overseas and the economic resources of this talent currently resident abroad.
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