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THOUGH there were always areas where local products could not compete, there were other realms that inspired. For example, most of the local bands appeased their audiences even while competing in overseas competitions. The first CARIFESTA, the voice of the late Pamela Maynard, who outdid the Galettes in 1970.
I want to congratulate Francis Quamina Farrier for connecting me with his page LEGENDS OF GUYANA PAST AND PRESENT. It’s awesome. This page compels us to wake up from the complex. We have done it before and can do it again legitimately and with the same originality.
Talent has never been a problem. I met Sandra Todd on Robb Street about a year ago and asked her about celebrating her father, the late founder of SID & the Slickers. She informed me that it would have to be a family thing. I agreed. But she did surprise me when she informed me that her dad was a self-taught musician. Yep, wow!
There’s no country that ignores its talented people like Guyana. Before the 1940s–60s, there was no worldwide music industry. When it emerged, it changed the mood of generations in segregated places like the then USA. It brought people together, as well as widened the appreciation for different types of music, accommodating new and cross-over talents. One of the most popular songs I inherited as I grew up in the 1970s was Jackie Wilson’s “The Night” (1960), which none of us knew then as a classical piece. It brought many new fans back to the classics publicly, though he was not the pop star that ventured into the perceived sacred world of opera music, which we considered a bourgeois sound in a different language. Then, if you didn’t sing calypso, Rocksteady, Sam Cooke, or Bobby Darin, “yuh wasn’t ready.”
We have got to step up our act with respect to getting talent discussions and advocacy in the areas of assembling creative platforms that can inhale both original and licensed music and drama. It will cost money, but it will open employment doors that don’t close easily. Everything took form in the ’70s for my generation, including Earth, Wind & Fire, and much more.
Miriam Makeba broke ground with a new array of music—inspiring! The phenomenon of her day was the fact that this was a voice with new melodies, not bound to a band, that inspired a generation and possibly inspired the then golden girl Abilo “Volder Caesar” of Yoruba Singers, among many others.
What I presume was the case for many local talents: the business of the music world—much like other realms of creative and inventive expression—required rules and awareness of its conduct. This will indeed challenge the surge of its expectations and gloried rewards.
One of the levels of initiation that GT talent missed was the business of the arts. It was missed because most authorities snubbed the vacuum that their talents required for sustenance. It was simple: no song or creative piece, as I tell young people—especially my children—on the internet is there on its own. Someone put it there, so someone owns it. Likewise, music.
The other thing that I’m aware of is this: if a popular artiste with clout asks to do our song, take his offer up. A musician from Linden, I think, refused Johnny Mathis, who wanted to do his song—and he jested about it and lost a chance. I think he was from Linden.
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