More than thirty years of involvement in singing gospel music has brought Miriam Williams to a place of greater enlightenment and realism about the pursuit that is her passion. She has endured, travelled and is currently preoccupied with assessing the crossroads which she appear to have reached in her career.
These days she appears to be far more contemplative of the dichotomy between a pursuit which she insists derives from a spiritual passion and the reality that whether the genre is gospel or pop, there is a dimension to music that is “business,” and it is, up until now, the challenges associated with turning her talent into commercial success that continues to preoccupy her.
She is hopeful the “Dare To Dream,” her recently released fifth album will bring her one of the things she seeks, a greater measure of commercial success. Her voice, the quality of her work, has already won her a generous measure of acclaim among gospel enthusiasts but the reality is – however much she is loathe to discuss it – that that is simply not enough. She has travelled outside of Guyana and has learnt that performers offering the gospel genre in the United States and elsewhere have found their own lucrative niche. There, the talent ranges from ‘old timers’ like the late Mahalia Jackson and Albertina Walker to accomplished contemporary gospel exponents like Beverley Crawford and Ce Ce Winans.
The prospects of transforming talent into commercial success here in Guyana are limited by a host of constraints not least, Miriam says, are consumer tastes that are conditioned by the skewed offerings of the media towards “foreign artistes.” There is a strict dichotomy, she says, between the adoring congregations that will cheer wildly for you at a Gospel Concert and the kind of commercial patronage that tells you that people place some sort of value on what you do. She talks about a culture that appears sometimes to have ensnared us in a habit of expectation, indeed entitlement that friends and relatives are entitled to “a free CD.” It is not that Miriam is averse to a measure of generosity though sometimes she appears fretful over what often appears to be insensitivity to the fact that producing CD’s is, in fact, a business investment.
Prohibitive local costs compelled her to travel to the United States – New York and Delaware – to produce ‘Dare to Dream.’ The output, one thousand CD’s cost her US$6,000 from meagre savings. Back home, she is finding the exercise of marketing her new musical offering tough. If one might think that gospel music would find a more than lucrative market amongst followers of the faith, that, Miriam says, is by no means necessarily the case. Stage “appearances” at church events and concerts simply do not offer a market the size of which matches the thousands of ‘followers.’
The curse of piracy and what she says has been the abysmal failure of the authorities to protect the country’s “creative people” from that particular scourge is never far from her mind.
She finds the automatic expectation of ‘a free CD’ to be an unflattering comment on artistes’ work, as though it is not deserving of a consideration. Perhaps more offensive, she believes, is the response to a price of $1,000 for an original CD to the effect that at least two pirated ones can be acquired for the same amount of money.
Miriam makes no secret of her disappointment over the failure of her own country to create an enabling environment for Guyanese artistes, reaching in the final analysis for the biblical urging against muzzling the ox that treadeth the corn.
Her decision to return to Guyana to release her latest album meant that she overlooked the opportunity to do so in the United States and to realise a much greater measure of success there. One thousand CD’s is a small number there. Here, she is still in the process of working her way through the marketing of the first few hundred.
Still, she refuses to believe that commercial success has passed her by though, she says, her perpetual ‘spirit of giving’ is currently moving her in the direction of seeking to determine how best she can contribute to the programme of activities to mark the 50th Anniversary of Guyana’s Indepen-dence.
She points to “Rise Guyana” a song on her recent album that represents an excursion into avenues of patriotism and ‘pulling together’ as a possible underlying theme that might well animate the anniversary celebrations. She seeks, too, to influence the embracing of the country’s Christian community as part of the anniversary programme by advocating a major Gospel Concert and perhaps even the production of a Gospel Album with patriotic overtones.
