Sometimes a pleasant surprise lands on your doorstep regarding someone else’s doings that connects strongly with you as it triggers memories in your own life or your own search. Recently, out of the blue, I received a CD done by a young Guyanese performer, Juke Ross, who has recorded a cover version of my song “Not A Blade Of Grass”. Produced here in Guyana, I was intrigued by the recording on two levels: first, because, although it was a different approach from the one I used with Tradewinds Juke had managed to capture the essential heart of the song as a straightforward paean to Guyanese feelings about country. Without ever feeling me out about my intentions or how the song originated, he had clearly captured the same ingredient that was in the original recording. Although we have since communicated by email, I haven’t spoken to Juke and while I don’t know much about him, including his age, my sense is that he is a fairly young man starting out on a musical career, and I was impressed at the sensitivity level he was showing.
Flowing from that, the second aspect was that the experience here, of a musical experiment by someone else, took me back to my own time in another country, Canada, as a young man, when I was starting out on the long process of becoming a musician and song-writer. For any aspiring artist those early times, which can last for many years, are a mixture of trial and error, of learning your craft, of, indeed, finding yourself as a creator and, in parallel, a great deal about yourself as a person. It is rarely the case, as often presented, of an overnight success. Most of the time it is a laborious process, by its nature often a solitary one, and along the way, because it is a very individual knowledge, not easily acquired by schooling, advice from others on the same search can be of significant help. Juke’s recording served to remind me vividly of my early search, and I took the time to send a note to him that might be useful to other youngsters here starting out in music.
I was deliberately brief in that short email to him because I wanted to focus on what I had come to see in my beginnings as the two essentials in a musical career.
