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Junkanoo and rake-and-scrape: the music of the Bahamas

Bahamian music sounds nothing like the southern Caribbean — goatskin drums, cowbells, and a carpenter's saw played with a screwdriver.

A different Caribbean

Visitors who arrive in Nassau expecting reggae or soca are usually surprised. The Bahamas sits at the northern edge of the region, closer to Florida than to Jamaica, and its music developed along its own line entirely.

The archipelago's isolation did the rest. With hundreds of islands spread over several hundred miles and travel by boat or small plane, the Family Islands kept traditions that Nassau — ninety miles from the American coast and saturated with American media — might otherwise have absorbed away.

Junkanoo

Junkanoo is the national tradition, and its scale is difficult to convey. In the small hours of Boxing Day and again on New Year's morning, organised groups parade through Nassau in enormous crêpe-paper costumes built in secret over months, accompanied by a rhythm section of goatskin drums, cowbells, whistles and brass.

The drums are tuned by heating the skins over a fire immediately before the parade. The cowbell pattern is the signature: a dense, rolling, insistent figure quite unlike anything in the southern Caribbean.

The competition between the major groups is serious and year-round, judged on costume, music and presentation, and the results are argued over for weeks. The origins are contested — likely West African masquerade traditions carried through the plantation Christmas holidays, with the name variously attributed to a historical figure or a West African term.

Rake-and-scrape

The Bahamas' other distinctive form is rake-and-scrape, and its lead instrument is a carpenter's handsaw, bent and scraped with a screwdriver or knife to produce a rhythmic rasp. Beside it sit a goatskin drum and an accordion or concertina.

Cat Island is the heartland, and the music remains functional rather than preserved — played for dances, weddings and gatherings, accompanying quadrilles and the heel-and-toe polka that came in through European contact and stayed.

Goombay, the older Bahamian popular music named after a drum, feeds into both traditions and gives its name to summer festivals across the islands.

Gospel and the modern dial

Bahamian church singing is among the strongest in the region, and gospel is not a niche format here — it is a dominant one. Sunday radio across the archipelago sounds entirely different from the rest of the week.

Contemporary Bahamian popular music absorbs Junkanoo rhythms into recorded pop and dance production, and the drums turn up far outside December. American formats are audible and influential given the proximity to Florida, which makes the stations committed to Bahamian music matter more.

How a Junkanoo group works

A major Junkanoo group is a substantial organisation. Hundreds of participants are divided into sections — the lead pieces, the off-the-shoulder costumes, the banner, the dancers, the brass and the rhythm section — and the whole presentation is built around a theme chosen months ahead and kept secret.

Costumes are constructed in shacks around Nassau from cardboard, wire and crêpe paper cut into fine strips and pasted by hand, a process consuming thousands of hours. The largest lead pieces are enormous and must still be carried by one person for the length of the parade.

Judging covers music, costume and presentation, and the rivalry between the principal groups is generational, with families belonging to the same group across decades.

Bahamian music beyond the parade

Junkanoo rhythms feed directly into recorded Bahamian music. Ronnie Butler, often called the godfather of Bahamian music, built a long career on that fusion, and the Baha Men took Junkanoo-derived rhythm to an international audience.

Contemporary Bahamian artists work across gospel, rake-and-scrape revival, and a local take on dancehall and Afrobeats, with the cowbell pattern surfacing throughout. Because American radio is audible across much of the archipelago, the stations that commit to Bahamian music carry real cultural weight.

Goombay and the older popular music

Before Junkanoo rhythms reached recorded pop, goombay was the Bahamian popular music — named for a goatskin drum, shaped by calypso from the southern Caribbean and by American jazz and swing arriving from Florida. It carried the islands' dance-band era through the mid-twentieth century.

Blind Blake Higgs and others recorded goombay for the tourist trade in Nassau, and the form fed directly into what came after. Summer goombay festivals across the Family Islands still carry the name.

Alongside it sat the sponging songs and work songs of the maritime economy, and the rhyming spirituals — a distinctive Bahamian sacred harmony tradition with roots in the same anthem-singing that shaped the islands' churches.

How to listen

Junkanoo season, from late December into the first days of January, is when the dial turns over completely. Rake-and-scrape appears around Family Island regattas and heritage festivals through the summer.

Hurricane season is the other time Bahamian radio matters most, when the stations become the working emergency network for an archipelago in the Atlantic track. The stations below carry all of it live.

Bahamian stations (3)

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