Granville Straker, Vincentian Who Built Straker’s Records Into a Calypso Empire, Dies at 86
The St. Vincent-born founder of Brooklyn’s Straker’s Records, the label that carried calypso and soca to the world, has died. His family announced his passing on August 27, 2026.
Granville Straker, the St. Vincent-born music man who turned a Brooklyn record shop into one of the most important calypso and soca labels in the world, has died. He was 86.
His family announced his passing on August 27, 2026, remembering him as a father, a mentor, and a music legend. He was born in St. Vincent on September 12, 1939.
Straker founded Straker’s Records in Brooklyn in 1971, at a moment when Caribbean music was rising fast in New York, and built it into an institution. Over roughly three decades the label released, by his own count, between 600 and 700 albums, more than a thousand twelve-inch records, and several thousand singles. AllMusic credited the label with defining major calypso and soca artists from the early 1970s onward.
The roster reads like a history of the music itself. Shadow, Chalkdust, Calypso Rose, Lord Melody, Black Stalin, Mighty Duke, Explainer, and Lord Nelson all recorded for Straker. He worked as a producer, a talent scout, and a concert promoter, and he traveled often to Trinidad in search of new voices.
In 1978 he brought in a fellow Vincentian, the arranger and pianist Frankie McIntosh, as his musical director. McIntosh wrote the arrangements for many of the label’s artists and oversaw hundreds of sessions with the house band known as the Equitables. Working out of Brooklyn, they helped shape the sound that carried soca out of the islands and across the diaspora.
For years the work ran through Straker’s Records and Stereo, his store on Nostrand Avenue, a gathering place for Vincentians and other Caribbean people who came for the music of home.
For St. Vincent and the Grenadines, this is not only a music-industry passing. It is the death of a man who placed Vincentians at the center of Caribbean music history and kept them there for a generation.
Straker is survived by his children and family, who remembered him as a man of vision, faith, and love, and said his music lives on.
Funeral and service arrangements had not been announced at the time of publication. Vincypowa News will update this report as details are confirmed.
Sunrise 12 September 1939 · Sunset 27 August 2026
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