From housewife to Chutney Queen, she is looking to get into “business”. The music business that is and though that has been a part of her life since she was a little girl, it is only now that she has a chance to make one of her dreams a reality.
With “Rum is meh Husband Tea”, a song that speaks of a woman whose husband only likes liquor, Sandradai Persaud, better known as ‘Girley’ captured the crowd’s hearts and the judges’ votes and emerged from the ranks of the contenders as the Chutney Queen of 2008. With the win, she is $500,000 and bragging rights for a year are also included.
Self-confident is an appropriate way to describe the new Chutney monarch. She projects such an aura of confidence that it is hard to believe that during the competition she had thought of giving up. But as she puts, “I am not a quitter [and] I keep going for it”.
Singing from the tender age of eight years old in the Essequibo River island of Wakenaam, is perhaps what has geared her for the rigours and expectations of a national competition and enabled her to rise above the other entertainers, some with years of experience, to emerge as the winner of the crown.
Not that she is inexperienced. In fact, she first entered the competition in 1998 and then won in the female category of the competition the very next year. But though she entered the competition for a number of times and was the second-runner up in 2006, she always strived for the crown but it eluded her. Until now.
Girley started out singing religious songs and then film songs before branching out into the chutney genre. She signs soul too. But Chutney is her passion and the fact that an aunt and her father sang chutney too helped to mould her to that form of music. “[When]you are born with it
