ABSTRACT
In the late twentieth century there was an increasing awareness of the lack of scholarly work on much of the Caribbean region’s music, and a common topic of conversation at the Inter-American Conference on Black Music Research held in Trinidad in 2001 was the need to research and document more Caribbean musics, especially the traditional musics, before the few remaining practitioners die and the music dies with them. It was the lack of published works on Barbadian music that had led me to focus on Barbados for my doctoral study, but it was only during my first field trip in 1997 that I decided to focus on tuk. Up to that point I had found very little written on the music, or any recordings, so when I went to my first tuk performance I wasn’t certain what I was going to hear.
