One of the benefits of my life as professional musician for over 65 years is that I’ve seen many different countries, some of which I have lived in, during my time – starting with Guyana, where I lived on the West Demerara, first at Hague, my birth place, then Vreed-en-Hoop, where the family moved when I was going to school in town – first at Sacred Heart High School on Main Street and then St. Stanislaus College on Brickdam. After graduating from Saints and getting a job with B. G. Airways, I then lived at Atkinson Field with my eldest sister Theresa’s family (she was married to Joe Gonsalves) before migrating to Canada in 1955, where I joined my mother and three other sisters in Toronto (they had migrated earlier). It was there that I married Dorothy Walker (we had two children, Luana and Tony) and started Tradewinds in 1966. After some 25 years in Toronto, with Tradewinds becoming popular across the Caribbean, I moved to Grand Cayman, relocating the band there in 1980 and travelling from there across North America and in annual trips to the region which had started in 1967. In the band’s early years, from our Toronto base and our own nightclub, We Place, we were crisscrossing North America on weekend engagements that took us across the continent from Halifax in the east to Vancouver in the west, and from summer time Montreal to South Florida’s Miami and Orlando.
