March 18th, 1984: Joseph Spence died in Nassau, Bahamas at the age of 73. Spence was born in Andros, Bahamas on August 3rd, 1910. Spence was the son of a pastor, and got his start in music as a teenager playing in his great uncle Tony Spences band. After leaving school he worked as a sponge fisher, stonemason, and carpenter, and as a crop cutter in the United States. The earliest recordings of Joseph Spence were made on Spences porch by folk musicologist Samuel Charters in 1958, with Charters initially thinking that Spences guitar playing was the work of two players dueling. These were released by Folkways Records on the album Music of the Bahamas Volume One in 1959. In 1964, Fritz Richmond travelled to Barbados to record Spence, and recordings made in Spences living room were issued on the album Happy All the Time. The following year, Jody Stecher and Peter Siegel made the trip to record Spence, recording tracks also featuring Edith and Raymond Pinder and their daughter Geneva, which were released on The Real Bahamas Volume One. These tracks included Spences arrangement of I Bid You Goodnight which was covered by The Grateful Dead and Ralph McTell among others. The album was a success, and led to Spence touring the US, with a second volume released in 1978. Mike Heron of The Incredible String Band credited Spence as the inspiration for the Lay down, dear sister passage in A Very Cellular Song on 1968s The Hangmans Beautiful Daughter. Curiously, Spence credited Heron with the same song, claiming to have learned it from the ISB. Spence released a third album, Good Morning Mr. Walker, in 1972, and performed several more times in the US during the 1970s. Several American musicians, including Taj Mahal, The Grateful Dead, Ry Cooder, Catfish Keith, Woody Mann and Olu Dara, in addition to the British guitarist John Renbourn, were influenced by and have recorded variations of his arrangements of gospel and Bahamian songs.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 15:00:01 +0000
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