"A Great Addition to Their Harmony": Plantation Slavery and Musical Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, first published in 1657 and republished in 1673, details the experiences of an Englishman who fled to Barbados after the English civil war. In Barbados he worked as an overseer on a sugar plantation, and his narrative provides an unprecedented glimpse into the emerging plantation economy. Ligon provides detailed descriptions of the island's crops, people, and government. This essay examines some key instances in Ligon's encounters with the plantation's enslaved laborers, one of whom, a man he describes as the plantation's chief musician, appears to have been of particular interest. Ligon's account not only documents African music in the Americas; it also narrates Ligon's own personal interactions with enslaved musicians, providing evidence of early instances of the musical exchanges between Europeans and Africans that would help define music in the Americas. Ligon discovers that the African musician he encounters on the plantation possesses a knowledge of both stringed and percussion instruments, and this knowledge leads him to speculate on the capacity of Africans to master European arts. A True and Exact History sheds light on the products of the interaction between English people and Africans and how these cultural encounters relate in turn to the larger processes of cultural intermingling and hybridity that began in Africa, took root on the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and continue throughout the Atlantic world and beyond.