Ned Sublette

Ned Sublette

Ned Sublette, author of the widely read Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press, 2004), first traveled to Cuba in January 1990. He co-founded the record label Qbadisc, which in 1992 pioneered the marketing of the contemporary Cuban discography in the United States, and beginning in 1991, he collaborated with the labels Luaka Bop and World Pacific/Blue Note on key US releases of Cuban music.

Over the last 25 years, he has produced more than 150 episodes of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Afropop Worldwide, and is a co-founder of Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep, which brings the work of scholars to a radio audience. He has reported for Afropop Worldwide from Cuba (including a multi-year 17-part “Cuban Connection” series), as well as from Angola, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Detroit, Miami, Lisbon, Salvador da Bahia, Caracas, and Barranquilla, among other places.

He is the co-author with Constance Sublette of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Lawrence Hill Books, 2015). He is also the author of The Year Before the Flood (Lawrence Hill Books, 2009); and The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Lawrence Hill Books 2008).  

He has been a Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland; a Guggenheim Fellow; a Tulane Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in New Orleans; a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in non-fiction literature; and is currently a research fellow at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Throughout the 1980s, he led a band in New York City, performing semi-regularly at CBGB, the Lone Star Café, Tramps, the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, Danceteria, and the Mudd Club, among many others. His song “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly,” composed in 1981, was recorded by Willie Nelson and released as a single in 2006. As a singer-songwriter, his albums include Kiss You Down South, Cowboy Rumba, Monsters from the Deep (with Lawrence Weiner) and Ships at Sea, Sailors and Shoes (with Lawrence Weiner and the Persuasions).