Charmaine Blackman talks about her years as a public entertainer with a sense of quiet but intense pride in her accomplishments. Six albums, separate stints with half a dozen bands and tours to various venues in Canada, the United States, Central America and the Caribbean are enviable accomplishments in a society where making a mark as a singer and remaining at the top of the pile is itself a considerable accomplishment.
That, though is not enough for a still aspiring entertainer who believes that there is even more to give and more to accomplish. No longer a wide-eyed teenager seeking her first big break she now looks to new experiences that will take her into yet unexplored territory. She knows that the road could become more challenging as it unwinds and she is prepared to work and to wait.
Her birth as a singer, she says, was accidental. In 1989, she allowed herself to be persuaded by colleagues in a Dance Club where she was a member to enter a competition. Interestingly, while the rules of the competition afforded her the option of dancing she choose, instead, to sing . “I was scared of what at that time was the unknown. I had sang in church as a member of the Brickdam Cathedral Youth Choir. That was as much singing as I had done up to that time.”
Third place, she says, in a lineup of entrants many of whom were considered far more accomplished singers was sufficient to persuade her that she could go further as a singer, after all.
Her first stint as a public entertainer was with the Blue Mist Professionals and she recalls that her first public performance with the band was at a calypso competition at the National Park, in 1989. The band itself lasted only a short while and her talent caught the attention of “a more professional band,” the Majestics. “I would consider the Majestics to be my first professional band given the routine of practicing regularly and making public appearances. At that time I knew very few secular songs but I was encouraged by the fact that I was learning and being paid as a singer.”
The, Majestics was the base from which she begun to build a career, offering mostly R&B renditions while learning to cope with public audiences.
It was at this juncture that she learnt to manage what she concedes is an innate shyness by making her stage entrances as unobtrusive as possible and allowing her performances to speak for themselves. Two years after she joined the Majestics the band became defunct. It was, she says, a time when there was a surfeit of music in Guyana, when bands came and went. Her departure from Majestics coincided roughly with a ‘vacancy” in the Yoruba Singers for a female vocalist. It was with the Yoruba Singers that she came to national attention, through high-profile public appearances and air time on local radio. “My first stint with Yoruba Singers lasted seven months after which I went to Pete’s Caribbean Fusion.
Charmaine worked with Fusion for a year and following a brief stint with Cannonballs returned to Yoruba Singers.
Her second stint with the Yoruba Singers afforded her international exposure, mostly to Guyanese and West Indian audiences in the diaspora. She recalls performing at the Urban Music Festival and Caribana in Canada and at the popular Labour Day celebrations in Brooklyn. Visits to the United States also afforded her the opportunity to perform for Guyanese audiences at popular Brooklyn night clubs. Barbados and Suriname are also among the countries in which Charmaine has performed alongside the Yoruba Singers. Her biggest stage, she recalls, was afforded by the December 31, 1999 Ring Bang Millenium Concert in Tobago where she shared the stage with the late Lord Kitchener, Machel Montano, Arturo Tappin and the internationally renowned Guyanese entertainer Eddie Grant, among others.
Her years with Yoruba Singers, she says, were among her best yet in music.
These days, Charmaine does not work with a permanent band and though she concedes that she misses working with a band she declines to talk about her departure from the Yoruba Singers. As a soloist she has worked on two cruise ships – The Princess and The Celebrity – on cruises in Latin America and the United States. “Those,” she says, “were memorable experiences” that allowed her to realise new kinds of exposures while adding to her range of experiences as a public entertainer.
Back in Guyana, as a mainstream public entertainer Charmaine says that her career is still to get her where she wants to go. “I’m still trying to get there,” she says. She talks about a Grammy Award but concedes that she is nowhere near realising that dream. “There are so many things that lead up to that,” she says. And after twenty years in the music business she still believes she has the time “to get at least close” to realising her goals.
Recently, her career appears to have taken a new and interesting turn. A few weeks ago she was spotted by a Rock producer during a visit to Costa Rica and she is currently working on producing Rock Albun. “I am working towards that goal amd if it goes well I may well be doing a lot of the kind of music in the future,” she says.
She talks about her “sense of adventure” as a singer, her renditions in Calypso, Reggae, Blues and most recently, Rock. “Gone are the days when audiences look to an artiste to do just one type of music. While I agree that some musicians have become famous for performing a particular type of music and while I believe that I am best known as a reggae artiste I believe that as a singer I have to do stuff that allows me to accept a break wherever it comes. If the break comes in Rock music then I may well be producing Rock music for the rest of my life.”
And while the local entertainment industry becomes “tougher, more competitive,” Charmaine Blackman continues to exude a firm belief in her talents and a confidence born, she says, of years of experience, that her career is still “going places.” She wants, she says, to “keep it going” even though there are obstacles in the way.
She talks about what she believes is a preference among Guyanese audiences for “other material,” music that restricts the proliferation of original material. “When you sing with a band you offer what the audience wants. Some shows allow you to do your own music but there are other times when you are expected to do other material. Some people don’t know how to weigh and sift a person’s talent until they do someone else’s stuff.” After performing more than three hundred of her own compositions and producing six albums Charmaine Blackman has done more than enough to be considered the leading female Guyanese vocalist of her generation.
She believes that the state of the local music industry sometimes serves as a disincentive to the advancement of careers. She markets her own music, both in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean and says that she has had an association with a distributor in the United States which has not ‘gone’ the way she has wanted it to go. “Your music is sold when people see you perorm, which is where I come in. I sell when I perform.”
She believes that the success of Guyanese music is linked to the passion with which it is embraced by Guyanese both at home and abroad. “When you visit a Jamaican home in the United States they play Jamaican music. That does not apply to Guyanese. I remember going to a Guyanese home in the United States and finding one of my own CD’s lying on a shelf, unopened……and I was being entertained with Jamaican and Trinidadian music.”
Charmaine believes that the local music industry has still not done anywhere near enough to market itself. “During my recent visit to Costa Rica I discovered that people there still remember Guyana on account of Jonestown. They do not even know that Eddie Grant is Guyanese.”
She believes that the way forward is for the Guyanese entertainment industry to work together. “Everything needs to come together because music is the backbone of many of the various other art forms and if we work together as a community in the arts we can go much further.”
The paradox she says, is that the situation grows better and worse simultaneously. “It is getting better in that there are more recordings being done and more aritstes coming on board. It is getting worse in terms of marketing and sales. People are simply buying one and duplicating the rest, so that the artiste is really getting nothing. I have taken my own material out of stores because it gets stuck there. Some stores will take a single copy of your work, re-copy it, sell those copies and leave the remaining copies of what you originally gave them on the shelf.”
