JOSEPH SPENCE was the most amazing goofball ever to dismember ...

So why was Spence a major influence on people like Ry Cooder? Because he was also a master musician and a unique, uninhibited, joyous presence who ran his island rhythms through an eccentric internal cam. He sang and played traditional songs, but never as anyone else would play or sing them.

He can croon/warble/mutter/slur/mutilate a Bahamian hymn like "Oh, How I Love Jesus" in ways that will make your jaw drop, but you don't doubt for a minute that he means every last word, that what he's presenting is the essence of his religion, if not of all true religion everywhere.

Happy All the Time is the title of a CD re-release of an Elektra album from 1964, and that's a perfect statement of what lies behind his voice as it drifts mid-phrase into grunts, laughter and attenuated verbal doodles. As for the guitar work, Cooder reputedly said that despite all he learned from Spence, he never understood some of his tunings, that they made no objective sense. Yet his guitar is as fast, as true, as bright and perfect as a lizard in the sun. On "Bimini Gal," both vocals and guitar are more like dancing sand fleas.

Spence was discovered and recorded on Folkways in the 1950s, but the total Islands context comes through most clearly on The Real Bahamas, first recorded in 1965 (now on a Nonesuch Explorer CD that includes a second volume from 1978). Here, he's joined by the Swain, Green and Pinder families, Frederick McQueen, George McKenzie and other musical cronies to make a kind of music that could not exist anywhere else in the world. Like Spence's own work, even when not directly religious, it speaks of and to the human spirit.

"Don't Take Everybody to Be Your Friend" is the only Spence solo on Bahamas, but it encapsulates all his wacky joy. For all that, it's not my favorite on the CD. McQueen's "Sailboat Malarkey," a slightly different sort of inspired nonsense, tacks serenely on a shallow sea. "God Locked the Lion's Jaw" (McQueen, Shelton Swain, Stanley Thompson), weaves together Noah's Ark and Daniel in the lion's den, forming a tapestry as sheer and strong as a spider web.

"I Bid You Goodnight" (Spence and the Pinders), as stated in the CD notes, "is one of the most beautiful songs in the English language?if not in the world." McQueen's "Come for Your Dinner" may be from an Anansi the Spider tale, but here it floats in space, an unexplained, inexplicable fantasy.

The song that hooked me on the original album those many years ago is "Numberless as the Sands on the Seashore." Shelton Swain's chanted vocal grows like bamboo?faster, higher, stronger by the minute, climbing out of sight until it explodes into the sky with ecstasy. In the end, words are not enough to hold the meaning; his voice lunges into short shouts and his hands slap together in glory. Meanwhile, bass growls and rumbles roam underneath, and Stanley Swain's high tenor pulls the chorus across the top like a vocal banner: a moment of human truth.

I've muttered occasionally about the content of CD reissues. There seems to be an imperative to add to, rearrange or reselect the material, and most of the time it's a mistake. The second volume of The Real Bahamas is distinctly inferior to the original and should not have been included on the same release?it pulls down the sense of worth left after you listen. Fortunately, the two volumes are just now being issued separately. Stick with Vol. 1.

What's Out There: Most everything by Spence, including the Folkways collections, is readily available.