About four years ago I travelled from Cayman for the funeral of my friend Bobby Clarke who had died in Castries after a tough two-year battle with cancer. Bobby and I had become friends in the early 1970s when Tradewinds were playing all over the Caribbean and came to make the first of many appearances in St Lucia. During my time in music, I have met, literally, hundreds of people, but only a few have become special. Bobby Clarke was one of those. In the 35 years after we met, I don’t think any two-month period passed without our talking to each other or visiting each other. I had even played with Tradewinds, as friends, at Bobby’s wedding in St Lucia. The bond between us never weakened. Bobby loved the Guyanese dialect – especially the cuss words – and he would frequently mangle it in our conversations. We made each other laugh. We told each other everything. We had become brothers.
Something else: many years ago, I had written a song called ‘Living in the Sun.’ Contrary to what people assume, very few songs are truly personal, but this one was. It had to do with my migrating to Canada and of, in effect, finding the Caribbean by leaving it − as Bobby did; as so many Caribbean people do − and there are two verses in the song about Bobby and St Lucia. So after his wife Angela called, and after I got over the
