Bahamian oral tradition through folk music and storytelling

What determines a true Bahamian? Our oral tradition by way of folk music and storytelling helps us to find our identity; it helps us create a link with the next generation in an attempt to keep our native culture alive. Moreover, oral tradition is more than history, because it creates bonds with the past. Oral tradition is simple, but, it is very rich because of the information it contains. Its roots lie in the oral traditions of the Bahamian people which bear not only their histories but their ways of understanding the world and their place in it. What is shocking to me is when I hear that the “Bahamian people don’t know where they come from’. Young people are occasionally
Therefore, for one to have a true appreciation for Bahamian folk music one must value their roots and their cultural heritage in which our ancestors fought and in some cases lost their lives for. However, the effects of storytelling and folk music on social development is that there is a good bit of literature that supports the notion that storytelling and folk music can strongly contribute to both young and older children social and psychosocial development. For example, research has shown that stories inform children about their lives, their dreams, their hopes, their problems, their tensions, and their conflicts of diverse social and ethnic groups. In this way, storytelling helps familiarize children with how groups of people, may be different from the group of children that they were raised with, and the way they perceive life and its events. It also helps them to understand where they came from and how they arrived where they are today. This was all made possible by the determined, talented, and aggressive people whom we know as our ancestors. Therefore, storytelling and folk music serves the function of maintaining a sense of the human community, by telling the story or song using universal themes common to all. In other words storytelling and folk music operates to broaden children and adults views of the world and their society while emphasizing the social ties that bind communities and groups of people together.