It happen here a lil while back, in the middle of we MASH
We ban some calypso outright friend, no more airplay, one lash
But why they pick on kaiso man, I just don’t understand
There are more important things now we should ban
The civil servant with a fancy house taking bribe left and right
Ban that, immediately yes, ban that
Some gutters up in Albouystown that block up day and night
Ban that, oh yes, no argument, ban that
And the ones that we have driving, drunk on vodka, rum or gin
If you want to ban, right away, with that crowd, let’s begin
Ban all the corruption, and the poor construction, look around and you’ll see
Like pot holes in the road, ban that now.
Going in, although this is the traditional Sunday space in Stabroek News for my SO IT GO column, I am operating merely as a conduit this week for my wife Annette and her very focused work as an environmentalist.as
I’m a typical case, I ain’t come to boast
Living with my wife in her casa East Coast
Pretty bungalow; two mango tree
Three dogs – Peppa, Jet and Choo
And if you ask me the best, ah not sure who
They each got their smartness, each got their way
It depends if they’re hungry and what time of day
My mother said, “In life there’ll be times when the tides are high
And the boat will be rocking as you try, just never give up, never give up
It’s hard to believe but you gotta believe
To achieve whatever you need to achieve, just never give up, never give up.
Looking back on the story of the emergence of my Tradewinds band in Caribbean music, it is interesting that I did not have any burning desire to be a professional musician when I migrated from Guyana to Toronto, Canada, in the early 1950s.
We’re facing in the world now what we never faced before
These days it’s steady worries, left and right
You have to cover up your face, and don’t shake people hand
And no crowds anywhere at all… that’s right.
Several weeks back, on a flight from Miami to Toronto, I ended up chatting with a Jamaican about the painful and often unintentionally humourous mangling of the English language that we see these days.
In the course of doing my column recently, I was reflecting on our tendency to see Guyana only through a negative lens, and I remembered a time in 2008, when I was living in Cayman, and had an exchange with a close Guyanese friend, George Jardim, living in America, who had sent me a couple emails on some matter in Guyana.
In my time living abroad, mostly in Toronto, Tradewinds gigs took me all over North America and to Mother England, and, of course, all over the Caribbean.
I wrote a column on this topic some time ago, but following some recent brouhaha in our local media over the quality of a particular artistic production, it is clearly a focus we have to keep revisiting,
It’s not obvious – in fact it’s often completely overlooked – but the truth is that in every high quality performance in the arts, the writing is the key.
Lately I’ve been overrun with old memories, some of them going back decades, like my Mom passing away and my sister Celia, both in Toronto, and my first wife, Dorothy, who was from Scotland.
Memory does not tell me exactly how many years back, but several decades ago I recorded a song, IS WE OWN, with Tradewinds, essentially highlighting aspects of Guyanese culture that constitute an integral part of our way of life, and the song has now become one of the Tradewinds standards frequently heard on radio and at various public functions.
Two days ago, out of the blue, I had an awful experience with the sudden death of a friend here, Colin Ming, in a traffic accident (he was on a motorbike) that just shattered me.
Learning, or more appropriately, perhaps, “awareness” is the better word, is usually a gradual, inch by inch process, building and building to finally get there as a shape you can put your mind around.
In the course of having a career in music, which led to my doing a series of columns headed SO IT GO in Sunday Stabroek, material of one sort of another comes to me in diverse ays. Recently,
Living in Guyana one has to struggle some days to look past this or that irregularity– street garbage; Exxon flaring; inhumane treatment of animals; etc–but some days the light comes on.