Joseph Spence: The Complete Folkways Recordings, 1958

The liner notes description by Samuel Charters, who recorded this music while in search of traditional folk music in the Bahamas in 1958, tells it all.  He and a colleague were on the sparsely-populated island of Andros, which had fewer than 900 residents, and he continued:

We went out one day about noon  . . . some men were working on the foundation of a new house, and as we came close to them we could hear guitar music.  It was some of the most exuberant, spontaneous, and uninhibited guitar playing we had ever heard, but all we could see was a man in a faded short and rumpled khaki trousers sitting on a pile of bricks.  He had a large acoustic guitar in his lap.  I wsa so sure two guitarists were playing that I went along the path to look on the other side of the wall to see where the other musician was sitting.  I had just met Joseph Spence.

Charters went on to note that

his playing was stunning.  He was playing simple popular melodies and using them as the basis for extended rhythmic and melodic variations.  He often seemed to be improvising in the bass, the middle strings and the treble at the same time.  Sometimes a variation would strike the men [working on the house] and Spence himself as so exciting that he would simply stop playing and join thyem in the shouts of excitement,

The unheralded guitarist then walked over to the house where Charters and his future wife Ann Danberg were staying and was followed by quite a crowd.  Unable to squeeze everyone into the small dwelling, Charters decided to do "the recording on the porch."  He then reeled off enough material for an album and a half, combined into one disc here, for the Folkways label, now Smithsonian Folkways.

After Spence "played as much as he wanted we paid him the little money we had" and then the musician headed off for animated games of Bahamian checkers until his friends finished their construction work.

Charters talked about attempts to get Spence more attention during the "new folk" scene in New York, but there were other musicians who were more popular and one visit in which the Bahamian guitarist was accompanied by religious family members led to a much tempered sound when he played.

These recordings are remarkable in that a guitarist with such stunning command of his instrument and with the inventiveness and creativity of a master improviser was found by happenstance.  Spence accompanied himself with a steady tapping of a foot to keep the rhythm rock solid and growled lyrics and hummed to keep in place with the song.   But, it's those variations and his use of all the strings of his instrument that make these recordings so amazing.