Bimini Gal
What does it mean to sing? The Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence might make you reconsider.
Words don’t always carry meaning in songs. Often, lyrics are just a vehicle for melody, and when written down can seem close to nonsense. In some music, the words are not words at all. Think of scat singing, and yodelling, and Scottish and Irish lilting. Or think of Vonlenska – ‘Hopelandic’, as it’s translated – the meaningless syllables in which Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros sometimes sings. In such cases, the human voice is a kind of instrument. Rather than meaning, it provides rhythm, or melody, or both.
Just occasionally, though – as in the case of Joseph Spence – a voice offers none of these things.
It was the summer of 1958 when Spence was first recorded, on the island of Andros in the Bahamas. Two folklorists, Samuel Charters and Ann Danberg, stumbled upon the guitarist by accident; he was playing in the street as they walked by. They offered him money, and set up their recording equipment on a porch, with a crowd of people from the neighbourhood gathered around. This track, ‘Bimini Gal’, was one of nine recorded on that day.
Everyone who writes about Joseph Spence writes about his guitar playing. How could they not? There are few people who can make a guitar sound like that. While his foot keeps a simple, steady beat on the floor, the notes dance implausibly around it, creating what sounds like multiple melodies and multiple rhythms at once.
Throughout this track, Spence explores variations of the tune on the guitar. He seems to be improvising, trying out different routes from one point to another. Occasionally, he takes a wrong step. You hear it a little before the four minute mark: the guitar stumbles almost to a halt. But his foot doesn’t falter, and almost at once he’s back where he needs to be, laughing loudly at his mistake.
The folklorists who made this recording were in the Bahamas looking for traditional local music: music that was unique to the place, not too tainted by outside influences. With Joseph Spence, in that regard, they failed. He may have been unique as a guitar stylist, but he was no more pure in his musical influences than Elvis.
This particular song was local. It had been recorded previously by Alan Lomax, in 1935, played on that occasion by the Nassau String Band. But Spence’s 1958 session also featured a version of ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, a calypso song from Trinidad, an American popular song from World War II, and a well-known spiritual called ‘Lay My Burden Down’.
In his younger days, Spence had worked in the southern United States as a farm labourer, and had picked up some of his musical vocabulary there. The songs and styles that he knew – calypso, blues, gospel, Bahamian folk – had been jumbled together and turned into something that’s not quite like anything else. It sounds Caribbean, certainly. But really it just sounds like Joseph Spence.
What interests me, though, almost as much as the musical innovation, is the very thing that will undoubtedly put some listeners off: his voice.
Is he singing, do you think? He definitely makes a stab at some of the lines. I hear the word ‘harbour’ every so often, and once or twice there’s a few words more. But in between those words, there are mumbles, grunts and laughter.
It’s not especially musical, and that’s what distinguishes this from other forms of wordless song. There’s no real tune and no fixed rhythm to the noises Spence is making. It’s just . . . well, it’s just noise.
So was this really the best he could do? Or did the pipe that was permanently clenched between his teeth get in the way? Or else – let’s be fair about this – did his guitar playing require so much effort and concentration that his voice just fell by the wayside?
Possibly. On all counts, possibly.
For his experimental, polyrhythmic playing, Spence has sometimes been compared to the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. But I’m put in mind, too, of another musician, Glenn Gould, whose eccentric vocalisations became part of his legend, as a performer and a recording artist. Gould, it seems, just couldn’t help it. Nor, I suspect, could Joseph Spence.
What I love about ‘Bimini Gal’, and about the entire recording that was made that day, is its sheer exuberance. Spence was an outrageously talented guitar player, and he seemed surprised, often, and thrilled, at just what he could do with this instrument.
That’s what I hear in his voice. I hear the sound of concentration, yes – that peculiar Gouldian mumble – and I hear, too, just now and again, something almost akin to scat. But just as often, I hear excitement. It’s those little exclamations of delight when an improvised phrase lands perfectly (just after 4’30”, for instance). It’s the sound of pure joy, both at the music he is making, and the effect it has on the crowd gathered around him.
What could you call that involuntary voicing of joy and delight in music? Well, you could call it singing.
