She and my Mum were planning to run away and join vaudeville. She had a cousin called Singing Verbena, who may have recorded a track with Lord Kitchener. My Mum told me that she used to sing live on the radio in Guyana, and apparently when she came to England, some people who she had been working with were looking for her to make films back there. My Dad’s name is Donald, but they called him Danny, and he would sing ‘Danny Boy’ and they’d record it on their reel-to-reel that they occasionally brought out on a Sunday. Then I discovered that my parents could sing also. We had loads of parties with Mighty Sparrow, the griot and story teller being played, and everything else from Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, soul classics from North America, as well as Doctor Bird, Bluebeat and ska. We had a ‘blue spot’ radiogram, and at nine I was tall enough to place records on the turntable. I may not have had a Pentecostal or gospel background, but when I listen to Jah Shaka it has a spiritual affect on me, this along with the ‘Cumfa drums’ played at carnival in Guyana, brings out the African in me. There are a lot of tunes I could tell you where I was when I first heard it, and how it made me feel. I learnt about classical music and English folk music through doing ballet and piano lessons, jazz through doing tap dance and of course there was church music, I went to the local Anglian Church of England school, which again has influenced me. I came to respect the Jamaicans because they wouldn’t tolerate the racism, and violent attacks against them from the teddy boys. Jamaican music was perhaps the most dominant music from the Caribbean it covered a range of situations and reflected what was happening in that society. We became ‘ja-fake-ans’ playing another chameleon for currency on the street. There was a culture clash because anybody that wasn’t Jamaican was a ‘smallie’. There were skinheads on the street, racism at school, so I had to be a chameleon to survive, as there was a lack of identity for me. I was usurped into a lower middle class British culture, in a nice house, in Enoch Powell’s constituency in Wolverhampton. Brip brap, police ah come and de gal a halla murder’.īut there was none of that culture when I came to England. They had a guitar, a basic drum, and they would sing and dance Kweh Kweh – and the people would sing songs like ‘Sancho lick he lover pon de dam and de gal a halla murder. Uncle George would lead the singing at festivals, one such event was that which proceeded a wedding celebration, where the women cooked outside. My late Uncle’s name was George Halley, but they called him ‘Paul Whiteman’, which I found out years later was the name of an American band conductor from the USA. It was more of a sensation which felt like I should dance to this tune. I didn’t know what the words meant, but the way they were married together and the construction, made me feel woozy. As a child, standing or sitting in the hot sun, listening to the radio, I found music very emotive. I heard Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke on the radio as we stood on the railway platform awaiting the train. In the evening there would be the death announcement, followed by music. There was no electricity in the villages, so we would listen to the battery-powered wireless for a couple of hours each day. In Jamaica, they say that ‘music is the beat of your heart’, and my love of music goes back to my childhood in Guyana. As a selector, we heard her Guyanese and eclectic Black British musical heritage, and listened to her ethical approach to DeeJaying that used counter-lyrics to challenge the misogyny, homophobia and paedophilia that was/is sometimes found in reggae dancehall. Donna Moore, as Sista Culcha, is significant in the history of sound system culture in the UK, because she led what many acknowledge as the first female sound system in the early 1980s.
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