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🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Radio

The US Virgin Islands gave the Caribbean quelbe — the scratch-band sound of banjo, guitar, ukulele and washboard that is the territory's official music, still called fungi by the people who play it. St. Thomas Carnival in spring and St. Croix's Crucian Christmas Festival bookend a year of celebration. Virgin Islands radio mixes quelbe and soca with reggae, gospel, R&B and island news. Listen live on J.A.W Online.

Danish islands under an American flag

Saint Thomas, Saint Croix and Saint John were Danish for roughly two and a half centuries before the United States bought them during the First World War, concerned about German submarines in the Caribbean. The Danish inheritance is still visible in the street names of Charlotte Amalie and Christiansted, in the architecture, and in the Danish-derived words that survive in local speech.

Today the islands are an unincorporated US territory. Residents are US citizens, use the dollar, and follow American federal law — but cannot vote for the president and have only a non-voting delegate in Congress. That ambiguous status is a permanent subject of local politics and therefore of local radio.

Each island has a distinct character: Saint Thomas commercial and busy, Saint Croix larger and more agricultural with a strong industrial history, Saint John mostly national park.

Quelbe, the official music

The Virgin Islands are one of very few places with a legally designated official music. Quelbe — known universally as fungi, after the cornmeal dish — is scratch-band music played on banjo, guitar, ukulele, a squash or gourd scraped with a wire, and often a saxophone or flute, with a washtub or conga holding the bottom.

The lyrics matter as much as the instrumentation. Quelbe songs are satirical and topical, carrying gossip, scandal and social commentary in the same tradition as Antiguan benna or Trinidadian calypso — a way of saying publicly what could not be said directly. The form survived as living dance music and is now taught and formally supported.

Three carnivals

The territory runs three separate festivals across the year. Saint Thomas Carnival comes in the spring, with calypso and soca competitions, J'ouvert and a parade through Charlotte Amalie. Saint John Festival follows around Emancipation Day and the Fourth of July. Crucian Christmas Festival on Saint Croix opens in December and runs into the first week of January, closing the year as Saint Thomas opened it.

That spread means the Virgin Islands are effectively in carnival season three times over, and the stations move through soca, quelbe and calypso competitions for a large part of the year.

The radio landscape

The Virgin Islands dial mixes American formats with strongly local programming. WTJX is the territory's public broadcaster; commercial stations cover contemporary hits, reggae and soca, gospel, and news and talk. American network content is readily available, which makes the locally produced programming the reason to tune in.

Hurricane coverage is central. Irma and Maria struck the territory within two weeks of each other in the late 2010s, and radio was the surviving communications channel through both. That experience shaped the stations and the audience's relationship with them.

Listening from abroad

Virgin Islanders move freely to the US mainland as citizens, and communities are established in Florida, New York and Atlanta. Because there is no immigration barrier, the movement is fluid in both directions, and the diaspora stays unusually current with island affairs.

Streaming carries the carnival seasons, the storm coverage and the quelbe — the last of which is heard almost nowhere else at all.

Live stations from US Virgin Islands (5)

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