The Lebeha Drummers

The Lebeha drummers hail from Hopkins, Belize, a small seaside village on Belize’s southern coast. Founded by Garifuna drummer Jabbar Lambey and his partner Dorothy Pettersen in 2002, Lebeha was established as a cultural center for local youth as a space where they could drum, dance, and socialize. Known as the Lebeha Boys, the original group of young drummers was mentored by Lambey. In 2005, the Lebeha Boys recorded their first album, Lebeha Drumming, and in 2011 recorded the album Raw. For nearly 20 years, they have been honing their craft and developing a style of Garifuna drumming immediately recognizable as their own through their idiosyncratic approach to Garifuna rhythm and melody. Two of the original Lebeha musicians, Warren Martinez and Clayton Williams, have emerged as great professional talents from this unassuming origin. 

The Garifuna people of today are descendants of people who survived war, genocide, exile, and discrimination. As an ethnic group, their origins are on the island of St. Vincent in the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. St. Vincent, called Yurumeinin the Garifuna language, was home to the Kalinago, or Island Caribs, prior to European invasion. West Africans first reached St. Vincent after fleeing a slave ship wrecked offshore. There, they encountered the Kalinago and began forming a unique community that, by the early 18th century in St. Vincent, was being identified by European colonizers as “Black Carib.” 

The Black Caribs fiercely defended their freedom from British and French aggressors. Finally, after decades of on-and-off skirmishes with European forces, the Black Caribs were defeated in 1795 after their great leader, Chief Joseph Chatoyer, was killed. After this loss, nearly 4,000 Black Caribs were captured and exiled to the barren island of Balliceaux. There, almost 2,000 people perished. In April 1797, the survivors were loaded onto a British ship and exiled to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Over the next decades, groups of Garinagu traveled north, seeking peace, liberty, and land, and the first Garinagu reached British Honduras (now Belize) in 1832. 

As a result of the genocide and exile that occurred on St. Vincent, the Garifuna culture has been all but lost there, but has been kept alive by Central American Garinagu. The past 40 years have seen a “Garifuna Renaissance” characterized by Garifuna cultural pride, the proliferation of punta rock, a genre of popular music, and alliances with Indigenous rights, pan-African, and African American cultures, music, and spiritual traditions.

The music of the Garifuna people blends West African rhythms, drum styles, phrasing, and dances with Indigenous Carib melodic structures and vocal styles. Developed over the past centuries in the Caribbean and Central America, Garifuna music is, like the Garinagu themselves, a beautiful hybrid that aurally showcases the rich history and heritage of the Garifuna people.

This is a living music tradition: it is constantly evolving to reflect the values, aesthetics, and social concerns of each new generation. Rooted in a repertoire of rhythms played on the garawoun (drums), Garifuna music is meant to be played in community, with drumming, singing, and dancing all occurring simultaneously. In the Garifuna language, there is no discreet word for “music,” but rather three verbs to describe musical activity: abinaha(to dance), áhuwara garawoun (to play the drum), and eremuha (to sing). 

The core instruments in a traditional Garifuna ensemble are two sizes of drum, the primero and segunda; gourd shakers (sísira); and vocalists. The sísira is an instrument of Kalinago origin, while the garawoun have their roots in West African drum construction (skin-head drums were not found in traditional Indigenous Caribbean music-cultures). 

Garawoun are carved out of a single tree trunk, traditionally mahogany or mayflower. An animal skin, generally from a deer or goat, is stretched across one end of the drum’s body and secured using a vine. Cords of natural fiber—or more recently, nylon—are looped through the vine and stretched down to a row of holes carved into the base of the drum. Each cord has a wooden toggle laced through it that can be twisted in order to increase the tension of the drumhead, raising its pitch. The defining characteristic of the garawoun are “snares” made of metal wire, nylon fishing line, or guitar strings stretched across the drumhead so that when the drum is struck, a buzzing sound is produced. 

There are two types of drums in a typical Garifuna ensemble: segunda and primero. The

segunda is the larger and lower pitched of the two. It is a timekeeping drum, as its player beats out a driving ostinato pattern. The primero is smaller and higher-pitched, and the rhythms played on this drum are fast, improvisational, and virtuosic. The garawoun are held between the player’s knees and played with the hands. The sísira, also called shakas in Belize, are dried gourds filled with the red seeds of the mimosa plant with a handle inserted into one end. The sísiraplayer emphasizes the “off-beats” of the rhythm by playing a quick, repetitive pattern. A pair of land turtle shells are also used in Garifuna ensembles; they are strung around the player’s neck and hit with sticks. The use of turtle shells in Garifuna music is a fairly recent addition, credited to Pen Cayetano and the Turtle Shell Band in the late 1970s.

Five Garifuna rhythms, or genres, are featured on this album: punta, paranda, hüngühüngü, chumba, and wanaragua. Punta is a rhythm associated with funerals, wakes, and belurias (called nine-night celebrations throughout the Caribbean) with accompanying songs traditionally composed by women. However, since the late 1980s, the punta rhythm has formed the rhythmic basis of punta rock, a popular Garifuna genre developed in Belize featuring electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and a much faster tempo than traditional punta. Here, the punta rhythm is used in the traditional style without the addition of electric instruments. 

Paranda has historically been a rhythm used to accompany narrative or moralistic songs performed by a singer with a guitar, called a parandero, often accompanied by the garawoun and sísira. This rhythm has enjoyed a recent revival through the internationally-popular music of the late Belizean musicians Paul Nabor and Andy Palacio, Honduran artist Aurelio Martinez, and Hopkins native Clayton Williams. The hüngühüngü is perhaps the most distinctive Garifuna rhythm. A semi-sacred genre, the segunda part of hüngühüngü consists of a slow, three-beat pattern reminiscent of a heartbeat. Dancers take two steps for every three beats played on the garawoun,creating a 2-3 polyrhythm.

Chumba is a rhythm that is, today, usually performed in folkloric settings; this rhythm accompanies a dance, usually performed by women, in which dancers enact tasks of daily life (gathering wood, digging cassava, tilling a field). Finally, wanaragua is the rhythm used to accompany Jankunú dancing (also called John Canoe), a Christmas-season dance enacted throughout the Caribbean which has become integrated into Garifuna culture. Wanaragua dancers wear costumes which parody European colonial-era dress and a pink or white-faced mask. The dance itself is jerky and “stumbling”—a mockery of European-style dancing. When wanaragua is performed, the primero drummer improvises in response to the virtuosic footwork of the dancer.

Biama offers a rich combination of old and new sounds; musical tradition paired with sonic innovation. It is rooted in traditional-style Garifuna music in that each track features traditional instrumentation, rhythms, unamplified instruments, and text in the Garifuna language. 

Alongside songs from the “traditional” repertoire are newly-composed pieces that feature original melodies and lyrics paired with uniquely Garifuna rhythms and instrumentation. For example, the track “Garifuna Nuguya,” composed by Clayton Williams – one of the original Lebeha drummers and an internationally celebrated parandero – was first recorded in 2015. It has quickly become a number one hit in Belize and an integral part of transnational Garifuna culture. An anthem of cultural pride and unity, “Garifuna Nuguya” features William’s soulful singing and masterful songwriting. Originally recorded with an amplified band, this is the first recording of “Garifuna Nuguya” to use only traditional Garifuna instrumentation. “Numadugu” was also composed by Williams. He describes the song as “a message to all young people and all my friends out there to be careful in life. With all the things happening in the world we all need to be careful and love each other.”

Warren Martinez has contributed two original compositions to the album. The first, Cabasa Wiega, is about a child asking their mother, “What do we have to eat?” She replies, “Don’t cry. Tomorrow life will be better.” The second, Saragatina Luba Laruga, describes his premonition: “I woke up because I felt my mother’s spirit calling me just before she passed away.” While Martinez has performed internationally in places including British Columbia, Kazakhstan, and at the New Orleans Jazz and Music Festival, he has built a successful career as a master drummer, teacher, and virtuoso performer in Hopkins and throughout Belize.

Biama is the culmination of 20 years of study, learning, and performance by the Lebeha Drummers, and 20 years of support by the Hopkins community. This album demonstrates the vitality of Garifuna music, the strength of community, and the resilience of Garifuna culture in the face of unprecedented cultural change and globalization. It is grounded in traditional Garifuna music yet showcases the unique talents and evolving musical sensibilities of the Lebeha Drummers. 

                                        – Lauren Madrid Poluha, PhD