In 1635 Spanish ships carrying kidnapped Africans wrecked in the Eastern Caribbean near the island of St. Vincent. Survivors swam ashore and took refuge among the indigenous Carib people, who absorbed the escapees. These Afro-Caribbean people were called Garífuna, and they produced a musical tradition combining powerful vocals with a dense percussive base. Defeated in the British takeover of St. Vincent in 1797, the Garífuna were exiled to Bay Islands, off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, from where they quickly settled the shoreline from Nicaragua to Belize.
As a population never enslaved, the culturally hybrid, multilingual Garífuna maintained palpable West African elements in their music, which builds on a three-drum ensemble resonant with African percussive traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Garífuna singing and drumming entails a fiercely percussive, communal call-and response formulation rooted in the sacred context of ancestral invocations and spirit possession, as in Cuban santería, Haitian vodoun and Brazilian candomblé. The most salient Garífuna secular traditional genres are paranda and punta. Spanish for "carousal," paranda adds an acoustic guitar to the Garífuna drum tradition; the punta couple dance (named for its characteristic rhythm) recalls the pelvic thrust or vacunao of the Cuban guaguancó rumba form.
In the early 1980s, punta rock, a creation commonly attributed to Belizean Garífuna musician, composer and artist Delvin "Pen" Cayaetano, added the amplified guitar to the Garífuna rhythm ensemble. Punta rock's upbeat message of cultural awareness and mutual respect has spilled over into the rest of Caribbean Central America. Among an ethnically diverse Belizean population it also has fostered an expansive sense of national identity both at home and abroad, and has brought belated recognition of the minority Garífuna population's contributions to Belize's cultural distinctiveness in the region.
The Garífuna garaón drum ensemble comprises the lead primera or heart drum, the counter-rhythmic segunda or shadow drum, and the steady bass-line tercera. An unusual adaptation is the snares, one or two guitar strings or wires stretched over the drumhead to achieve the buzzing sound also favored in some West African music cultures. This lends a highly valued denseness to the overall sound, which may deceive the ear as an artifact of electronic distortion in the recording process. Additional traditional instruments include turtle-shell percussion, bottle percussion, claves and a variety of shakers and scrapers drawn from the Amerindian music of St. Vincent. Garífuna musicians have expanded their instrumental array with European additions, while also incorporating English, Jamaican, Haitian and Latin American folk elements, along with reggae, C&W, R&B and rock gleaned from radio broadcasts.
Prominent Garífuna artists include Junie Aranda, Jursino Cayetano, Lugua Centeno, Paul Nabor, Pen Cayetano, Mohobub Flores, Peter "Titiman" Flores, Dale Guzman, Adrian Martínez, Andy Palacio and Gabaga Williams (Belize); Cuadro de Danzas Garífuna Baruda, the Farm Boys, Fuerza Garífuna, Grupo Lanigi Mua, Lita Ariran and Aurelio Martínez (Honduras); and Sofia Blanco, the Garífuna Boys, Suamen and Ugandani (Guatemala). —Michael Stone
