Granville Straker

Granville Leonard Straker was a Saint Vincent born, Brooklyn based record producer and music entrepreneur who became one of the most important figures in the international spread of calypso and soca music. Through his label Straker's Records, founded in Brooklyn in 1969, and the retail stores he built alongside it, he gave a commercial home to Caribbean music in the United States at a time when few American labels or shops paid it any attention.

Born in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on September 12, 1939, to Clement and Irena Straker, he moved first to Trinidad and then, in 1959, to Brooklyn, New York, where he would spend the rest of his working life. He founded Straker's Records in 1969, releasing his first two singles by the Brooklyn based Vincentian group Sounds Inc. As Caribbean music took hold in the borough's growing West Indian community, he opened record stores to sell it, including a long running shop on Utica Avenue that he ran for decades, along with another outlet on Nostrand Avenue. Some later tributes date the formal founding of the label to 1971, reflecting how the retail and recording sides of the business grew together.

Over roughly thirty years, Straker's label put out what he told researcher Bill Nowlin amounted to 600 to 700 albums, more than a thousand twelve inch records and several thousand singles, an extraordinary output for an independent operation. His roster included many of the biggest names in calypso and soca, among them Shadow, Chalkdust, Calypso Rose, Lord Melody, Black Stalin, Mighty Duke, Explainer and Lord Nelson. He was not only a label boss but a working producer and a talent scout who traveled regularly to Trinidad in search of new performers, and a concert promoter who helped bring calypso artists to American audiences. From 1978 his musical director was fellow Vincentian Frankie McIntosh, who wrote arrangements for scores of Straker's artists and led the house band, the Equitables, through countless recording sessions.

The music writer Mark Romano, writing for AllMusic, credited Straker's Records with having shaped the major calypso and soca artists of the early 1970s onward, a judgment widely echoed by musicians and historians of the genre. For Caribbean communities in Brooklyn and beyond, Straker's stores and studio functioned as a cultural anchor, a place where new arrivals could find the music of home and where established stars could reach a diaspora audience. His first wife, Jean "Patsy" Straker Jackson, played a foundational role in the early development of the business. He later shared 24 years of marriage with Beverly Straker, and he was the father of seven children, including Dr. Suzanne Straker Greenidge-Hewitt, who spoke for the family after his death.

Straker died on August 27, 2026, at the age of 86. His death was announced by his family, who described him as a cultural ambassador and entrepreneur. Tributes followed from across the Caribbean music world, remembering him as a pioneer who built what amounted to a small empire of calypso and soca production and distribution spanning Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. No cause of death has been made public.