25 July : Exuma

Exuma is an artist of whom I had never heard until he cropped up on an Albums You Must Hear tweet. It turns out he issued 2 albums in 1970, though I don’t have release dates for them.

Exuma was a Bahamian named Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey, who moved to New York to study architecture. He ran out of money and, as he was hanging around Greenwich Village, he started a band using the name Tony McKay. In 1969 he created the persona of Exuma to perform his music, which was a heady mix of influences, rooted in Bahamian calypso, but a dark and twisted calypso.

His first album, Exuma, The Obeah Man, drew deep on Bahamian folklore and culture, and especially the Obeah tradition.

My initial note on putting on the first track was Holy Shit! Ritchie Havens meets King Sunny Ade. During the album I heard echoes of both those artists plus Desmond Decker, Dr. John and Leadbelly. Despite the echoes, this is clearly the work of a singular performer.

Exuma II is more of the same. It is more theatrical, but also more assured.

Despite the holy shit moment, I’m not sure that this is something I could listen to often. I agree that, for me at least, the albums are ‘must hear’, but probably only once–although I will likely revisit that opinion later in the year. The best two tracks, or at least the ones I enjoyed most, are the title track of the first album and Baal on the second.

I don’t know how much of his Obeah persona was showbiz. shtick for a presumed white audience and how much was genuinely held belief. What did interest me, though, was that he maintained it throughout the rest of his life and had a pretty decent career, according to his Wikipedia page. There is no correlation between an artist’s success and whether or not I’ve heard of them, of course, but in his case I genuinely had never heard of him.

I listened on Spotify, but here are a couple of tracks via YouTube: