Music of the Virgin Islands

Music of The Anglophone Caribbean
Genres
Calypso Chutney Dancehall Dub Junkanoo Ragga Rapso Reggae Ripsaw Rocksteady Scratch Ska Soca Spouge Steelpan
Regional music
Local forms	Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Bahamas Barbados Bermuda British Caribbean Caymans Grenada Montserrat St. Vincent and the Grenadines St. Kitts and Nevis Turks and Caicos UK Virgin Islands US Virgin Islands Other Anglophone islands
Related areas	Aruba and the Dutch Antilles Cuba Dominica Dominican Republic Guadeloupe Guyana Haiti Jamaica Martinique Puerto Rico St Lucia Suriname Trinidad and Tobago

The music of the Virgin Islands reflects long-standing West Indian cultural ties to the island nations to the south, the islands' African heritage and European colonial history, as well as recent North American influences. Though the United States Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands are politically separate, they maintain close cultural ties. From its neighbors, the Virgin Islands has imported various pan-Caribbean genres of music, including calypso from Trinidad and reggae from Jamaica.

The major indigenous form of music is the scratch band (also called Fungi band in the British Virgin Islands), which use improvised instruments like gourds and washboards to make a kind of music called Quelbe. A Virgin Island folk song called cariso is also popular, as well as St. Thomas' bamboula. The quadrille is the traditional folk dance of the islands, and include varieties like St. Croix's Imperial Quadrille and St. Thomas' Flat German Quadrille. The Heritage Dancers are a respected dance troupe that perform traditional folk dances from the Virgin Islands and beyond.

Virgin Islander culture is syncretic, based primarily on African, European and North American cultures. Though the Danish controlled the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands for many years, the dominant language has been an English-based Creole since the 19th century, and the islands remain much more receptive to English language popular culture than any other. The Dutch, the French and the Danish also contributed elements to the island's culture, as have immigrants from the Arab world, India and other Caribbean islands. The single largest influence on modern Virgin Islander culture, however, comes from the Africans enslaved to work in canefields from the 17th to the mid-19th century. These African slaves brought with them traditions from across a wide swathe of Africa, including what is now Nigeria, Senegal, both Congos, Gambia and Ghana.

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Wikipedia