I did a television interview here recently along with Al Creighton and Ron Robinson on the subject of the arts as a propellant for social cohesion. In the course of the discussion, responding to a question on music by the host, Neaz Subhan, Al Creighton referred to songs as often being “reflections” of a culture. I have mentioned this condition in previous writings, arguing that most of our popular Caribbean songs, rather than influencing behaviour, are actually drawn from our existing culture and are indeed “reflections”, as Al put it.
Some two weeks after the interview, I played in Toronto last weekend to a crowd of mostly Guyanese performing a number of Tradewinds songs with the band of Raymond Lee Own (Guyanese know him as Chinny) which included Chinny on guitar, Barbadian Brian Huntley on bass, and Ricky DaSilva on drums. It was a rousing night, with a sold-out crowd in a festive mood; one of those nights where you don’t want the session to end; you want to keep going. I had started out the evening by mentioning to the crowd that the first song we would play, Honeymooning Couple, had been written 50 years ago, coinciding with my decision to do only Caribbean music with Tradewinds, and the set that followed was all Tradewinds material except one song from an old Trini calypsonian called Killer, and even that song I had massaged into Tradewinds shape.
I could look back on it the next day and recognize the “reflection” aspect Al Creighton had mentioned in almost every one of the songs; I could see that the longevity of the material owed largely to the fact that the songs I had chosen to write were about Caribbean life. With one or two exceptions, those 100-plus songs are about how we live, our habits, our foibles, our weaknesses, our joys, our behaviours, and therefore a connection is made on the basis of who we are. Years after I was well into the work, with Trade-winds established, (I’ve mentioned this before) Guyanese musician George Jardim said to me one day in a gaff somewhere, “These songs you write; it’s sociology. You use humour sometimes, but it’s about sociology.” Frankly, I had never thought of it in that way, but it hit me immediately that he was right. Almost every song you go to, it’s there – Copycats; Boyhood Days; You Can’t Get; Wong Ping; It’s Traditional; Is We Own; Where Are Your Heroes; Women in Love; Hooper and Chanderpaul; Caribbean Man; etc, it’s about how we live our lives. And flowing from that, it’s the reason the songs endure; I’m holding up a mirror.
About a month ago, a young black girl working in the gas station near us comes up to me all excited about her loving ‘Boyhood Days’ – she had it on her cell phone, and she played a piece for me. She was in her twenties, had heard the song some place, and bang, it resonated for her. Actually, if you think about it, the content of the song had come from “her”, in that she had experienced many of those things, so the recognition was built in. She had seen the reflection. Similarly, some weeks earlier, it was there in a brief encounter with Michael George, the owner of the refurbished Herdmanston Lodge, who quoted the line in Is We Own “wallaba posts on the Corentyne Coast” and said “You point out things we didn’t seem to be noticing”. It’s again another example of the song-writer operating as an observer, showing the society to itself.
This is a very complicated subject for me, because there are so many aspects to it, but only living in the Caribbean again am I able to see the result of that instinctive choice I made back in big city Canada way back in 1966. I’ve thought about it a lot. I still don’t know for sure what made me make that turn, but as I look back on it, it appears to me as not so much a thought, but as something concrete, like a building or a structure just standing there, that I couldn’t avoid, and one that is still hugely present in how I’m seen now. That young lady in the gas station last week is a perfect example. It’s in play almost every time I encounter people in the homeland; it comes up, without exaggeration, virtually daily. A handshake, a hello, a conversation, a shout from a passing car, sometimes just a smile or a wave, a request for a cell-phone picture – all from the source I had chosen. I’m walking on Lamaha Street, and a man passes me going the other way; he glances at me, gives me a half smile, says “Dave”, and he’s gone. I never saw him before, may never see him again, but that moment stays like a photograph, coming back to me from time to time.
I’m going into all this now after Toronto, because I was off-hand about it in the past. I would sometimes be cavalier with persons who were obviously fans. I was a veritable youngster then; I didn’t understand then what I do now. I hadn’t yet come to the stage of realising that they were responding to the reflections; I couldn’t see that far then. So the bottom line today is to say a few public words to those people like the ones in Toronto last week singing along with the songs and hugging me up afterwards: “Thanks for your embrace and the kindness you show me in so many ways. You have no idea of the warmth those encounters bring me, and how fondly I remember them.”
