What this archive is, and what it is not
This archive gathers and cross-checks information that is already public: platform catalogues, press articles, official posts by artists and labels, music videos, press releases, and interviews artists have given to other outlets.
It needs saying plainly, because it is the first thing a researcher must know: no interview was conducted for this work, and no fieldwork was done. Nothing here rests on testimony collected first-hand. When a page quotes an artist, those words come from an interview they gave elsewhere, and the source is named.
What this work contributes is therefore of a different order. Bouyon had no assembled corpus. The information existed, scattered across platform pages, local press articles and social media posts, in two languages and across several islands. Bringing it together, dating it, cross-checking it and linking it up is the work that was done. What you find here is a map, not a testimony.
Academic work can use it as a starting point and as an index of sources, since every claim points back to where it was found. It cannot use it as a first-hand source on what the people involved think or lived through. That material still has to be collected, and nobody has done it yet.
How a fact gets into the archive
A date, an attribution, a label, a collaboration or a tempo is only written down with at least two independent sources that agree. A single source is enough to open a lead, never to publish a fact. When a piece of information rests on one source only, the entry flags it with a lowered confidence level.
Every factual claim carries a source tag, listed again at the foot of the page. A reader can trace it back without going through the author.
When two sources contradict each other, the disagreement is written as it stands, not settled quietly. The Bouyon Road March is the example: Dominica News Online ran "first-ever Bouyon Road March" for Triple Kay in 2019, and Soca News ran "inaugural" for RAGS in 2025, with the same promoter behind both editions. Both claims appear in the archive, with their sources, and the distinction between them.
What is refused is just as clear. A date, a tempo, a quote, a proper name or a chain of attribution without a verifiable source does not get written, even when the claim looks obvious. A fact that fails verification is removed, and the correction is dated.
Who writes this, and why it matters
This archive is written by Terry Capitolin, also known as TIITII NBA, a bouyon artist based in Guadeloupe and a member of the New Bouyon Wave collective.
That is a conflict of interest, and it is declared here rather than left to be discovered. It bears on the contemporary period, the one where the author is himself an actor in the scene being described. Pages covering that period should be read with this in mind, the way one reads a participant's account.
The historical chapters, from the birth of the genre in Dominica in 1988 through the 2010s, rest on no personal knowledge of the author. They are built from external sources only, and that is where the cross-checking work carries the most weight.
What is missing
The limits are known, and better stated. The sources are mostly online: physical archives, local radio holdings and private collections have not been consulted. The genre's early years therefore rest on thinner documentation than the recent period, when they are the ones that would most deserve attention.
Images are missing too. Thirty-two entries have no photograph, twenty-five of them for Dominican artists, which is to say the birthplace of the genre.
The text of this archive is reusable with attribution, under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence. Images and recordings are not covered by that licence. The working material is available at no cost to anyone who wants to use it for research: the breakdown of eighteen public interviews, each with the programme, the date, the audience and the facts drawn from it; fifteen transcripts of videos and podcasts; a general timeline and the working synthesis that serves as the internal reference. Just ask.
