Music festivals in Barbados

A number of holidays, festival and other celebration play an important role in Barbadian tradition and music. Christmas and Easter are very significant and each is associated with their own musical traditions as a distinctly Bajan celebrations such as the crop over festival and the Landship movement.

source of picture: repeatingislands.com

The main crop over festival is celebrated the end of the sugarcane harvest. These festivals are held in the great house of the plantations and comprises of both the slave and plantation managers. The festivity includes the drinking competitions, feasting, song and dance, and climbing a greased pole. The musical accessories are powered by triangle, fiddle, drums and a guitar, played by slave entertainers. The crop over festival continue to play a part of Barbadian culture, and always feature music by performers in sugarcane cutting costumes but several modern performers are not themselves sugarcane cutters.

The Barbadian Landship movement is an informal entertainment organization which mocks, through mimicry and satire, the British navy. The Landship started in 1837, founded by an individual known differently as Moses ward and Moses wood, in Britton’s hall located in Seamen’s village. The structure of the Landship organization mirrors the structure of the British navy with a ship which is connected to a dock (a wooden house similar to a chatte house), and leaders who are called the Lord High Admiral Captain, Boastswain and other navy ranks. Each unit is named like a typical navy ship and may include actual names of British ships or places. The Landship performances show and reflect the passage of ships through rough seas.

Parades, jigs, hornpipes, maypole dance and other music and dance types are a part of the Landship Society’s festivity. The council of the Barbados Landship Association regulates the movement.

Barbadian Christmas music is mostly based on church and concert hall performances, where typical North American Christmas carols are performed; like the White Christmas and the silver Bells, alongside works by English composer like William Byrd, Henry Walford Davies and Thomas Tallis. In the present years, calypso, reggae and other new elements have become a part of local Christmas traditions. Compared with the present, the 1960’s Barbados was home to a distinctive practice, in which scrubbers travelled from house to house singing hymns and receiving rewards from households.