How this work is made

This archive gathers and cross-checks information that is already public: platform catalogues, press articles, official releases from artists and labels, music videos, statements, and interviews artists gave to other outlets.

It has to be said plainly, because it is the first thing a researcher needs to 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 he or she gave elsewhere, and the source is named.

What this work brings is of another 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 connecting it is the work that was done. What you find here is a map, not a testimony.

Academic work can therefore use it as a starting point and as a source index, 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 remains to be collected, and nobody has done it yet.

A date, an attribution, a label, a collaboration or a tempo is only written 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 alone, the page flags it with a lowered confidence level.

Every factual claim carries a source tag, repeated at the foot of the page. Readers can trace it back to its origin without going through the author.

When two sources contradict each other, the disagreement is written as it stands, not settled in silence. The Bouyon Road March is the example: Dominica News Online ran "first 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 source and the distinction that separates 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 is not written, even when the claim seems obvious. A fact that did not survive verification is removed, and the correction is dated.

This archive is written by 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 that reservation 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 solely from external sources, and that is where the cross-checking work counts most.

The limits are known, and better stated. The sources are mostly online: physical archives, local radio holdings and private collections were not consulted. The early years of the genre therefore rest on thinner documentation than the recent period, when they are the ones that would deserve the most attention.

Images are missing too. Thirty-two profiles have no photograph, twenty-five of them Dominican artists, which is to say the cradle 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 show, 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. You only have to ask.