Dahi bin Walid (1898-1941) was one of the first generation Bahraini recording artists of sawt music, the urban genre that has come to be prized as the ‘classical’ urban musical genre of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, often historicized as having its roots in the Abbasid court. Histories and commentaries relating to this genre, whether lay or scholarly, are central to the construction of a notion of urban culture in the Arabo-Persian gulf, and by extension to the national and regional identity construction more broadly. Practically every study of modern Gulf and Bahraini sawt music gives attention to bin Walid and his colleague Mohammad bin Faris (1895—1947). What is consistently left out is that bin Walid was born into slavery and became the chattel ‘property’ of that very same colleague, whose aunt was the head wife of Bahrain’s ruler and who gifted her nephew her musically gifted captive. The relevant writings in Arabic are generally based in oral history and personal recollections. In these, bin Walid’s social status is largely absented from the discussion on his life, and only mentioned in passing if at all. European language ethnomusicological scholarship, has been based in these same sources, and when they have picked up on bin Walid’s African origins, it has been to repeat tropes of “Africa” in order to offer them as a possible explanation for his competence as a percussionist, or in the more pernicious cases, to focus on stories of bin Walid as having eavesdropped and stolen from the repertoire of the royals. I begin this paper by tracing the life-story of bin Walid, enmeshed in the Indian Ocean pearl trade and the musical life of its seafarers, and his struggle to gain recognition as a composer and lead performer in his own right despite known attempts by members of the royal family to relegate him to the role of accompanist. In the second part of the paper, I analyze successive waves of writing on music in Bahrain and sawt music in the Gulf that has actively whitewashed bin Walid’s life in their work to construct modern Bahraini and urban Gulf identities and authenticities.