Tag Archives: reggae

FMM 2 17 2023 Meet me at the Crossroads

“You may bury my body down by the highway side. So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” ~Robert Johnson. There is something about music that transports us.  Last Saturday I was visiting Atlanta, and in one day experienced three distinct genres of music.  I drove with my daughter-in-law to get […]

FMM 6 10 2022 Blurred Lines

“We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” ~ Maya Angelou. Growing up a white kid in the heart of Jamaica provided me with the most mind-expanding education you can be privileged to have.  I was young enough when I moved there not to have many pre-conceptions, and since I was welcomed into […]

FMM 1 14 2022 Reggaefication Redux

“Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.” ~ Ravi Zacharias. I may be prejudiced, but there is something special about Jamaica the country and Jamaica the people.  When my mother was in the last decade of her life, after she had lost her life partner (married for 66 years, engaged for 3 years before […]

FMM 9 18 2020 To Gather

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” ~ Albert Einstein. My father-in-law was a special man.  He was famous in his district for being a straight shooter, he called things as he saw them.  If you knew you had done something wrong, or foolish, you avoided him, for he didn’t joke to point it out.  He […]

FMM 12 6 19 Reggaefication

“Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.” ~ Ravi Zacharias.  I may be prejudiced, but there is something special about Jamaica the country and Jamaica the people.  When my mother was in the last decade of her life, after she had lost her life partner (married for 66 years, engaged for 3 years before […]

FMM 4 5 19 Distilled Spirits

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.” ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I was a late arriver to the gym scene.  My husband took up jogging in the early years of our marriage, but I always told him I preferred to exercise my mind.  With a […]

FMM 10 12 18 Who am I?

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” ~ John Donne. When I left Jamaica in the mid 70’s, I hadn’t heard the word ‘Soca’ used to describe the music we associated with those small islands of the Caribbean.  It was Calypso music back then, and we mostly heard it in a 5-minute block […]

8 31 18 I’m with Them

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” ~ Frederick Douglass. Music formed the backdrop to my formative years.  In a little Jamaican town where the Saturday open air market was our mall, and the only place we got dressed up to go was church, we milked every ounce of pleasure out of music.  […]

FMM 4 27 18 Adjudication Withheld

“Beware, so long as you live, of judging men by their outward appearance.”~ Jean de La Fontaine. Sometimes it is hard to imagine how far we have traveled in the past 60 years.  Even less than that. Nowadays you can tell the age of a movie from the presence (or absence) of cell phones, and […]

FMM 2 9 18 Fusion not Fission

“Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world… Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis.”~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I am not sure how old I was when I started dancing.  I have memories of entertaining one of my aunts with my version of ballet, self-accompanied (some […]