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Saramaccan Sound (Suriname) are a brother duo – Dwight Sampie and Robert Jabini – who write and perform flowing acoustic songs sung in Saramaccan, the language from the Americas with the most African elements. Their debut album was recorded in situ by Grammy winner Ian Brennan (Parchman Prison Prayer, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones) along a remote riverside in the Amazon region of Suriname. The lyrics are topical and reference everyday strife such as the rising tides and floods in the area due to global warming.

Their bone raw songs and performances evoke heart-worn longing, a deep sense of place and a strange familiarity. As if Merle Haggard had been raised in the Amazon rather than Bakersfield.

“Where the River Bends is Only the Beginning” is the 12th release in Glitterbeat’s acclaimed Hidden Musics series.


I cut down a tree.
I made two boats.
They will carry me to the sea.

Entering the rainforest— the lungs of the earth— we rode up-river to settlements reached only by boat. We passed villages swallowed whole. Many of the still existing towns may soon not be here— submerged down river from the dams or drowned by the rising tides.

The singers we recorded, Dwight Sampie and Robert Jabini, were Saramaccan. Linguists consider the Saramaccan language notable because its vocabulary is based on two European source languages, English (30%) and Portuguese (20%), and various West and Central African languages (50%), but it diverges considerably from all of them. The African component accounts for over half of the vocabulary, the highest percentage in the Americas.

“We come from one belly. All from the same mother…” was a lyrical theme.

A village alarm bell was rung the first night we were there. We were informed this was a bad sign, a notice that someone from the village had passed while .......
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