The Georgetown Groove

I am in the early stages of planning a musical tour of South America as a belated follow up to the tour of the EU we did in 2020. It will be a while yet because there are quite a few gaps to fill first. While I have loads of options to choose from for countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Peru the opposite is true for the likes of Paraguay and Surinam.

Research has started, though, which is how I discovered a truly fantastic Guyanese album that is too good to hold back and more than deserving of a post of its own. 

It is called "Fighting For Survival" and it was released in 1981 by the Yoruba Singers, a Guyanese band that formed in 1971 and are still going strong. The blurb describes their sound as "a heavy mix of calypso, jazzy funk, reggae and afrobeat", which sounds right to me. You can pick up a digital copy of the album on Bandcamp for the scandalously cheap sum of $7, and I strongly encourage you to do so. 

Here are a couple of tracks to whet your appetite, although any two of the others would have done the trick just as well.

"Frustration" - Yoruba Singers

"Me, Selwyn and Buddy Clyde" - Yoruba Singers

And here are the lads (and lass) in 2014. 

A sad story. If only the long grass hadn't gone blabbing its mouth off things might have turned out very differently. Its no better than that whispering grass.