Hartley Neita

The favourite choir in those days was the East Queen Street Baptist church, especially when it had guest-singers such as soprano Blanche Savage and tenor Granville Campbell.

Senior citizens who grew up in downtown Kingston have told me that one of the joys of their parents and friends was to gather outside the churches in the now inner-city at nights to hear the choirs rehearse.

The late Sister Ignatius of Alpha also told me of the crowds, which gathered nearby to hear rehearsals by the Alpha Boys Choir, as well as the Alpha dance band.

Humming along

Trade Unionist Frank Gordon also told me of the hundreds, who congregated on the sidewalks, outside the East Queen Street Baptist Church, Coke Methodist Church, and the Congregational and Moravian Churches on North Street to hear the hymns and anthems rehearsed by the choirs of these churches. They hummed and sang along.

Some members of these crowds had beautiful voices, but they did not attend these churches. Theirs was a different form of service from where they attended on Saturdays and Sundays. But they loved the depth and strength of the pipe organs, which they did not have in their places of worship. What, I have been told, was interesting, was the tense debates among these audiences about the merits and demerits of these choirs. For Jamaicans knew music and loved good music. They still do, but do not hear enough of it.

The favourite choir in those days was the East Queen Street Baptist church, especially when it had guest-singers such as soprano Blanche Savage and tenor Granville Campbell. Then there were the Diocesan Festival Choir conducted by George Goode and the St Andrew Singers led by organist Lloyd Hall which also attracted crowds at their rehearsals.

It was not only choirs which attracted these crowds. The same occurred when Olive Lewin started the Jamaica Folk Singers. I am told too, that there was dancing in the street near to the rehearsal home of the Frats Quintet.

I do not know if this tradition of listening to church choirs has continued. There are too many competing attractions such as sound systems and television. Jamaicans now also talk too much and do not listen.

Great sponsorship

It is against this background that I welcome Sandra Shirley's announcement of First Global's sponsorship of a campaign to bring back good music to Jamaica. Entertainers in the dance hall medium are not singers or philosophers as some writers and radio and television commentators proclaim.

Jamaica has been blessed with great singers such as Archie Lewis, Buddy Ilgner, Myrna Hague, Winston Roach, Francisca Francis, Louise and Blossom Lamb, Mercedes Kirkwood, Amru Sani, Joscelyn Trott, Bobby Breen, Hubert Porter, Totlyn Jackson, Sheila Rickard; and by musicians such as Byron Lee, Baba Motta, Janet Enwright, Billy Cooke, Lennie Hibbert, Sonny Bradshaw, Leslie Butler, Con Allison, Joe Harriott, Cecil Lloyd, George Moxey, Milton McPherson, Redver Cooke, Wilton Gaynair, Tommy McCook, Eric Deans, to name a few.

We do have great singers and musicians today, but they are drowned out by the cacophony of technology. Let us see if this First Global programme can recapture the time when we danced cheek- to-cheek to love poems and not sexualise to the 'jugy-jugu' of artificial romance.

columns@gleanerjm.com