Like so many Guyanese who have migrated to North America, I have a special place in my heart for Canada as the place where I matured as a person and developed as a song-writer and a band-leader. I spent 25 years in Canada, and while I saw much of the country I developed a love, in particular, for Ontario where I lived all the time I was there. I have often said that my 
development as an artiste is owed largely to those years outside Guyana, because although as The Tradewinds began I was focusing as a writer specifically on the Caribbean, the execution of what I was about rested on the ambience and opportunities of Toronto. One salient example was a small downtown entertainment place called the Mercury Club in which I had my first experience as an unknown immigrant with a guitar. I entered the Amateurs Night at the club, singing the ballad ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, nervous to my core, but gaining second place among the nine other performers. It’s almost eerie that following the formation of the Tradewinds in 1966 I ended up buying the Mercury Club in 1970. I renamed it We Place, and it was a home-away-from-home for Caribbean people for almost 10 years until I moved the band to Grand Cayman. We Place gave us a permanent base between tours, and was essentially the hinge on which much of The Tradewinds’ later success swung. The point here is that with the state of the music industry in Guyana, it would have been impossible for me, as a musician starting out, to even dream of a development like that in my homeland.
