So It Go

Over my 50-plus years in the business of popular music, I cannot count the times I have heard the question, “How do you come up with these songs?”

Among the many things I discovered after migrating to Toronto in the late 1950s was the value of the Guyanese dialect I had grown up with; something in fact that I had been made to feel ashamed of in my homeland, a condition not unique to me. 

A disruption in the nuts and bolts of our lives, apart from the irritation that comes with it, can sometimes also be instructive in showing us how much more efficient we are now in communicating or sourcing, in a variety of ways, compared to how we went about those things in the earlier, less complex, life pattern that many of us wish still applied.

It is sometimes the case with the international events surrounding us that an occurrence in a distant country can have relevance for us, in completely separate matters, in our homeland.

Partly from her conservation interest and partly from  her access to  Air Services Limited aircraft, my wife Annette has pretty much been all over Guyana, so when she came home last week raving from a trip to Karasabai, describing it as a standout in our country, I had to pay attention.

As I write this, Florence, a massive hurricane, is approaching the US mainland, taking dead aim at North Carolina, and it sends me back to my experience with such storms.

I don’t know enough about the subject of animal nature to say why it’s so but for me the jury is in on the matter of mankind and animals, and the verdict is that dogs are the best.

As someone who has chosen to live in Guyana again, I have speculated in this space about the various magnets operating on Guyanese who could live elsewhere but choose Guyana. 

For the first version, I’m going back in time quite a stretch, back to the early 1950s in my youthful years in West Demerara, first at Hague and then at Vreed-en-Hoop. 

We are seeing it starkly demonstrated once again this week: the power of popular music in our lives, and in particular that of the American music format with a product that is embraced all over the world, even in countries where English is not the national language.

I have said it before and often, but some things need repeating: particularly in a time when we see so much to fix in Guyana, we should be also taking time on the obverse to champion what is of value among us in our people. 

Living in Guyana again and becoming caught up in grumbling about this or that like most folks, it has begun to occur to me of late (partly from seeing a variety of video footage and still photographs) that we don’t seem to take the same note of the positives that exist here, right under our noses, along with the other stuff that rightfully draws our indignation. 

Part of my current stint as Artist in Residence at the University of Guyana, in the time of Vice-Chancellor Ivelaw Griffith, has involved interactions with students.

A few days after my recent column on some good news items for Guyana, I was hit with another example as I found myself as an observer at the National Toshaos Conference at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre at Liliendaal. 

Life in Guyana can bring us so many traumas that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are bright spots, as well, and indeed part of the process of dealing with the days here, as so many of my friends the likes of Ian McDonald and George Jardim are wont to tell me, is to focus on those bright spots, indeed, lean on them or turn to them in the bleak moments. 

Hardly a week goes by in the Caribbean without some disappointed West Indies cricket fan bemoaning the slide of the team that was once at the top but now is bouncing around at the bottom. 

In a social situation recently, I heard one of our senior citizens relate an incident early in her life where she gained, as she described it, “a lesson I never forgot.” 

Probably because I have spent most of my life in the entertainment business, I am often interested, I would even say taken aback, to see the adulation, I would even say hysteria, that the famous persons in our societies generate. The

One of the realities of modern life is the amount of time we spend waiting – for the telephone technician to come; for the traffic jam ahead of you to clear; for the part you ordered from overseas to arrive, and, particularly taxing for me, the amount of time we spend in various customer lines or waiting-rooms. 

I spent a week recently in my former stamping grounds, Grand Cayman, doing a spot in the annual stage show, Rundown, which I started there 25 years ago.