THE WORLD OF PLURALISM IN
EXUMA’S EXUMA
Pretty Heraclitus
︎
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
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.
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.”
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.”
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
Pretty Heraclitus sent this anonymously.
“[Obeah] was with my grandfather, with my father, with my mother, with my uncles who taught me,” Exuma said in a 1970 interview. “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
philosophy, aug 23
philosophy, aug 23
PHOTO: Exuma in concert (1972); dancers at a Junkanoo festival (1975); Exuma II (1970)
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.”
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
Pretty Heraclitus sent this anonymously.