^{PHOTO: Exuma live in concert, Soul!
PBS TV; dancers at a Junkanoo festival; Exuma II // 1972; 1975; 1970}

_{“[Obeah] was with my grandfather, with my father, with my mother, with my uncles who taught me,” Exuma said in a 1970 interview. “It has been my religion in the vein that everyone has grown up with some sort of religion. He unlocked the secrets to Moses, good and evil, so Moses could help the children of Israel. It’s the same thing, the whole completeness—the Obeah Man, spirits of air.” // HEADER PHOTO: Mercury Records © 1970}

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philosophy, aug 23

    Perhaps the plainest thing about Exuma, Bahamas’ eclectic junkanoo artist, is that he was born a man. Macfarlane Gregory Anthony MacKay was born in 1942, growing up largely in Nassau, Bahamas, a city made famous by pirates who settled for fresh water and a place to hide their gold. “I came down on a lightning bolt / Nine months in my mama’s belly / When I was born, the midwife screamed and shout / I had fire and brimstone coming out of my mouth.” In the city there was a different treasure: singing and clapping and sensuous dancing; tin cans filled with rocks (“shack-shacks”), tambourines, goat-skin drums, and papier-mâché masks. There is the annual Junkanoo, a festival of song, dance, colors, and community. Though Exuma left for New York at 17 (on a seemingly random aspiration to be an architect), he would soon run out of money and turn once more to the music and pageantry and calypsos of the Bahamas.

MacKay thus rechristened himself Exuma, “the Obeah Man”—channeling the spirit of Bahamian spiritual healers and spell-casters known as Obeahmen. “I started playing around when Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, Richard Pryor, [Jimi] Hendrix, and [Barbra] Streisand were all down there, […] performing at the Cafe Bizarre,” Exuma recalled. “I’d been singing down there, and we’d all been exchanging ideas and stuff. Then one time a producer came up to me and said he was very interested in recording some of my original songs, but he said that I needed a vehicle. I remembered the Obeah Man from my childhood—he’s the one with the colorful robes who would deal with the elements and the moonrise, the clouds and the vibrations of the earth. So, I decided to call myself Exuma, the Obeah Man.”


Exuma would soon break away from the 1960s folk scene and record his debut record. This album would be 1970’s Exuma, an explosion of junkanoo, calypso, psychedelia, ghosts, zombies, poetry, reggae, outsider-rock, and spiritual philosophy. Everything about the album was a lightning bolt. In the 7-track album, he’d taken everything he’d ever heard, from Joseph Spence to Sam Cooke, and changed it to his liking and his image. He was influenced by “everybody and no one,” he would say. The album’s producer, Bob Wyld, and other musicians on the album, too, were rechristened: Daddy Ya Ya, Spy Boy Thielheim, Lord Wellington, Princess Diana, and so forth.


Exuma would describe the music as decidedly otherworldly. He described his and his backing band (the Junk Band)’s participation in it as merely the “human emotion part,” as though the sounds came to them and they hurried to capture it. Exuma is “all music that has ever been written and all music not yet written. It’s feeling, emotion, the sound of man, the sound of day creatures, night creatures and electrical forces.”


This music didn’t tell the story of just anyone, though. It spoke specifically of Bahamian people, of racism, slavery, and of the magico-religious Caribbean world.


In 1760 there was an unsuccessful slave revolution between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Colony of Jamaica. This fight for freedom, later titled Tacky’s Rebellion, was instigated by an Obeah man, according to Bryan Edwards, a politician, historian, and anti-abolitionist. Edwards described this people as occultists, as “savage, vampire-like cannibals without any human sentiment.” And from then on, the practice of Obeah was viewed as black magic: illegal and anti-British. In Exuma’s singing, though, he refutes any such connotations or interpretations of the practice and his people. “I’ve got the voices of many in my throat / The teeth of a frog and the tail of a goat / I’m Exuma, I’m the Obeah Man,” he boasts, repositioning the culture as one not of primitivism but of shared healing and power.


Later in “Dambala,” a heady spell of a song, he calls upon a syncretism of Dambala, a creator-spirit of the Obeah faith, the Christian God as well as the Devil, to exact revenge. “On the seventh day, God will appear / On the seventh night, Satan will be there […] You slavers will know / What it’s like to be a slave […] You won’t go to heaven / You won’t go to hell / You’ll remain in your graves / With the stench and the smell.”


“When Africans were shipped to the New World,” Lindsay Haines writes, “they were forced to relinquish language, culture and religion. Black magic they managed to cling to, perhaps because [it] represented revenge and hope to them.” And in Exuma there is magic aplenty. There is a séance even. The 7-minute “Séance in the Sixth Fret” is a dark apotheosis of the album’s metaphysical explorations into life, death, and the liminal spaces. But the album never settles on one groove. The immediate next song, “You Don’t Know What’s Going On,” is the opposite: a bouncy, accessible folk-soul singalong, riffing on the old Socratic maxim, “I know that I know nothing.”


Exuma navigates, smoothly and robustly, such ontological discourse, repeatedly conjuring Afro-Caribbean folklore and mythology. There are multiple references to Charon, the Ancient Greek ferryman who transports the departed through the rivers Acheron and Styx, together with Hector Hyppoplite, the great Haitian painter and Vodou priest, who just like Exuma served as a mediator between Caribbean and Eurocentric cultures.


The worlds of the living and the dead, God and Satan, Bahamian and Western, all collide and collude in Exuma’s dance. “I try to be a story-teller, a musical doctor, one who brings musical vibrations from the universal spiritual plane through my guitar strings and my voice. I want to bring some good energy to the people.”


The man named Exuma would go on to record 10 more albums—including the hypnotic Exuma II (1970) that same year—produce several paintings later exhibited in the US and Bahamas, write plays, two books, receive the British Empire Medal for contributions to Bahamian culture, and influence perhaps the greatest artist of his time, Nina Simone, who assumed the role of “Obeah Woman” for herself.

Though his albums weren’t commercially successful, his influence remains in the universe. Jordan Peele’s recent Nope (2022) was inspired in no small part by the artist. “At its core, this movie is about giving agency to the erased or underappreciated figures in history—which ties in directly with Exuma and his legacy.”


And though Exuma would experience some great personal tragedies, he maintained making music to his last day, sharing his time between Miami, Florida, and his childhood home in Nassau. “I am a writer, a poet, a romanticist, a thinker, a philosopher, and an artist. I write what I am and what I see and according to what spirit touches me at the moment.”

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