Q, your comment that the song "The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy' is from the West Indies motivated me to think about the tremendous amount of cross-pollination that has occurred [and has continued to occur] between African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.

I'm particularly interested in the subject of shared cultural patterns & products between these two groups of people because I am of Black Caribbean and African American descent.

Many years ago when I was in public school & in college there was no mention about the ways in which 19th century [and earlier] Afro-Caribbean music & other cultural forms were similar to, different from, and influenced 19th century & earlier Southern African American cultures and vice versa. I remember learning that as a result of the 'triangle trade' in slaves, some enslaved Black people lived in the West Indies before being sold to slave masters in the US South. But I can not recall any mention of the impact that West Indian culture may have had on the cultural heritage of these enslaved people. I guess that was because the dominant view was that these people weren't really people and had no cultural heritage worth noting or studying from the West Indies, from the US South, or from Africa.

And, at no time in my public school or college [not even in an African American history class] was there any mention of the role 19th century and earlier Black sailors played as world travelors and as two directional carriers of those culture which were thought to be non-existent or not worthy of acknowledgement or study.

Because it is better late than never, I am making up for lost time in studying subjects such as Caribbean spirituals and Black sailors.
And I've no doubt that these two subjects are related.

For instance, I find articles such as Holidays In The Sun {The Real Bahamas}, Caribbean Voyage: Carriacou Calaloo , and Pirates and Sailors: Black History on the High Seas to be very interesting and very educational.

With regard to Caribbean spirituals, here's one excerpt from that second article whose link I provided:

"In addition to the Big Drum songs and the Creole-European dances, this Carriacou sampler includes two anthems or spirituals as well as three pass-play songs. The pass-play songs are similar to those found on Brown Girl in the Ring, an earlier release in the Alan Lomax Caribbean Voyage series and the anthems remind me of spirituals found in Trinidad, the Bahamas, and the southern United States, though they maintain a fairly distinct local flavor. The notes suggest similarities between the anthem I Want to Hear Somebody Pray and the spirituals of the Gullah people of the Georgia Sea Islands, but to my ears sounds it shows a striking resemblance to the Calinda, a stick dance that is found on a number of Caribbean islands, including Carriacou. One Night As I Was Walking was recorded at a nine-night wake and is an example of the strong tradition of funeral music and wake music that can be found throughout African-American communities in the Spanish, English, and French Americas. The surge of the chorus after each stanza makes this a particularly powerful anthem".

-snip-

And here's a link to a Mudcat discussion about Black sailors for those persons reading this discussion who may have missed that thread:

Black Jacks: History & Shanties