Cabin in the Wata

Walter Ferguson was two when his parents moved from Panama to Cahuita, a small fishing village on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast, and he spent nearly all of his long life there. His father was Jamaican, and English was Cahuita's everyday language. Nobody taught Ferguson music. He taught himself harmonica, ukulele, guitar and clarinet, learned from calypsonians such as Mighty Sparrow, and wrote his first calypso during the Second World War. "Cabin in the Wata" is one of an estimated two hundred songs he went on to write, in the local Creole English, about farming, faith and the joys and troubles of small coastal towns, with his trademark mix of humour and tragedy. For decades the songs barely existed on record. Ferguson worked as a farmer to support his ten children, and from the late 1970s he recorded himself on cassettes, overdubbing his own harmonies by copying one tape onto another, and sold each unique tape to travellers. He never wrote the songs down or kept copies. A 1982 album for Smithsonian Folkways had poor sound and never reached Costa Rican shops. Then in 2002 the label Papaya Music set out to record him properly. Ferguson, then 83, refused to travel to San José, so the studio came to Cahuita, to a room in his family's hotel padded with mattresses and rugs against parrots, dogs and passing buses. The albums that followed rescued him from obscurity. A calypso festival in Cahuita has carried his name since 2013, and he died in 2023 at 103, the patriarch of Costa Rican calypso.