Mylon Clarke, part-time music teacher at the Parkinson Memorial School.
Concerned by the lack of knowledge students have about their culture, music teachers at the Parkinson Memorial Secondary School banded together to plan a few workshops in hopes of reminding the young students about their heritage.
This is according to music teacher at the school and one of the facilitators of the Folk Song Workshop, Mylon Clarke, during an interview with The Barbados Advocate yesterday morning.
“This morning we’re speaking about folk songs and the culture of Barbados. With independence coming up, we had two other seminars before this one
that dealt with Tuk Band and Landship and today’s seminar focuses on folk songs,” he said.
“We hope that these seminars give students more information on the culture of Barbados on a whole because right now, Crop Over is just bashment soca and a lot of students surprisingly do not know about folk songs, Landship, Shaggy Bear, the Stilt Walkers or Mother Sally, so we’re trying to sensitise the students to this.”
Clarke revealed that they would be visited by The Mighty Gabby, who would sing a few songs and give his take on the culture of Barbados as well as the characteristics of a folk song; and Ronnie D, who would teach the children how to write folk songs.
“This is the last seminar for now but in the future we hope to plan a few more seminars as the students really enjoyed and were looking forward to the seminars that we had planned out for them,” he said.
Ronnie Davis, who is responsible for music at the National Cultural Foundation (NCF), Crop Over and other events explained to students that folk music is a style of music that could be played by any musician.
“The songs focus on current issues or issues of the past such as unrest and labour issues. If there was a quarrel in the neighbourhood, someone wrote about it. Whatever took place back then, persons wrote about it,” he said.
“They were also focused on historical events as well, so when you hear someone singing a song like ‘Miss Mattie’, these are things that would have happened years ago.”