The practice of voodoo (as popularized in the recent Disney trash hit) was the result of a bunch of guys from all over Africa, thrown together on a tiny island, and sentenced to harvesting tobacco for French nicotene addicts. Life without parole.

Needless to say, they had different languages, diets, rituals, and of course, forms of musical expression. Somehow, they managed to cobble together a culture called vou-dou, a gumbo of traditions, accompanied by plaintive, lyrical melodic forms from the Islamic North, and mixed with complex poly-rhythms of the Bantu, which, to the untrained ear, might sound like a guy falling down the stairs with a bunch of pots and pans.

The island was San Domingue, which later became the Republic of Haiti, after a British-led slave insurrection sent the French and their entourage of quadroon mistresses packing. They embarked to La Espanol (now Cuba), where they discovered a drug even more addictive than tobacco, namely, sugar, which they brought to the northern-most point of the Caribbean slave-trade, Nouvelle Orleans.