LEFT: Cocoa Tea performs at Beenie Man's Summer Sizzle held on Saturday August 27, 2005 at Jamalco community centre. - CARLINGTON WILMOT. RIGHT: General Trees - FILE
I HEARD A song on the radio on Wednesday morning which brought a smile to my face. I do not know who the singer was, but he was celebrating the joys of a visit to Treasure Beach. (It was not Noddy Virtue, who has become synonymous with Treasure Beach, courtesy of the Digicel Rising Stars competition).
I like to hear when we celebrate the beauty and benefits of our country in more ways than in song, not only in th patriotic songs of Tony Rebel's Sweet Jamaica but also in the more specific way of naming places.
Marley, of course, celebrated 'yard' both ways, in Smile Jamaica - which he insisted was not a song that said he was a Jamaican - and also in Trench Town.
About four years ago, Cocoa Tea, the man from Rocky Point with that sweet, sometimes almost lilting, voice, celebrated Montego Bay, urging "Let's meet at some special place ... down in Montego Bay".
It is natural that the fishing village which grew would get attention in song, as it is portrayed as this idyllic place (for visitors more so than for Jamaicans, that's for sure), with the other tourist town out west, Negril, getting lots of attention as well. This was both from the deejays and the singers. Who can forget Tyrone Taylor almost dragging out the words "from a little cottage in Negril/I wrote these lines to you", then singing of those who get high and then "go west to watch sunset at Rick's Café".
FAMOUS SONG
The famous Negril sunset also made it into the famous song declaration "I'll never leave you again", with the observation "Me love the pretty pretty sunset, down a Negril bay/half inna de water, half inna de sky".
Then there was General Trees with Gone a Negril in the early 1980s (and, more recently, Reach a Negril), in which Trees rasped on not only that town on the western end of the island but others in between with:
"Yu wanna go to Negril
Or even to MoBay
Gonna take you to Ochie or a St. Ann's Bay ..."
Ernie Smith honoured his St. Ann's Bay roots in Didn't Know We Were Poor, in which he sings of going to the beach and rolling in the sand.
Fab Five and Early B took trips around the island in soca and deejay style respectively, Fab Five celebrating the varieties of "Jamaican woman" ("... a sugar an salt/some a dem a ginnal an' will make you bawl") and Early B inviting "come mek we circle Jamaica, like some American visitor".
As it is in real life, St. Thomas is just salt in song, with Red Dragon meeting the bony girl whose bones went 'cru crum crum' at a dance in that parish.
When it comes on to the ladies, though, it is Portmore where the most variety (including 'lenky titti Arlene' and 'maaga foot Anita') are to be found. It is in Edgewater, to be more specific, that he finds the women and goes to a dance in Manchester where Nuff Man Deh Yah.
And Ras Karbi stood up for the majority of Jamaica when he sang "more people deh a country than town/some a dem black, some a dem brown/it sweeter dan sugar an it sweeter dan spice/me neva know sey country life could so nice"
Spa nap spa nap!
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