It is said that you should not blow your own horn but, as the Market Vendor promotes, if you don’t blow it nobody might remember to blow it for you.
So today I am shedding all inhibitions and blowing my own horn in respect to the 40th anniversary of the annual Crop Over Festival which, coincidentally, was officially launched yesterday in the same place where the very first came to life, right in the heart of the City of Bridgetown.
I was one of the persons responsible for that birth and I have no problem if, as a hater of the festival, you condemn those of us who gave it life in its present form, or if, as a lover of the festival, you give us a thumbs-up.
It was the then Barbados Tourist Board’s public relations manager, the late Julian Marryshaw, who fell on the idea of having an event in June that would change that month from being a very dead one for tourism. Having been made aware of what had been an annual day of celebration on plantations to mark the end of the sugar harvest (crop over), he set about seeing how that defunct activity could be brought back to life in a new body that would be attractive to both Barbadians and visitors alike.
To this end, Marryshaw selected a committee headed by board member and member of the popular Merrymen group, Emile Straker, with each person also heading a subcommittee responsible for a particular aspect of the project. I got a pick on the team primarily because at the time I was at the zenith of one of my lives, that of promoter. Only a few months before, I had staged the first show at the National Stadium, The Original Opels In Concert, followed by the just as successful Wendy Alleyne In Concert, Michael Thompson In Concert and Toe-To-Toe with Tony Grazette and Clarence Thompson at the same venue.
And so it wasn’t too long before the baby started taking shape but, obviously, a different shape to that from which its name was borrowed. The reason was that the original crop over celebration was a one-day-only affair filled with music, dancing, nuff-nuff eating, drinking and other merrymaking in excess.
So how do you take a day and turn it into a month or even a week? You stretch it. Fortunately, 1974 was but ten short years after the Jaycees-sponsored Barbados Carnival was brought to an untimely and abrupt end by officialdom. Started in the mid-1950s, it was a carbon copy of T&T’s Carnival and had nightly road marching to live steel band music, as well as Calypso King, Carnival Queen, steel band, King and Queen Of The Bands and other competitions and lots of fetes. The climax was a big costume bands parade.
So we borrowed some of those elements of Carnival, added them to some innovative variations of the original celebration and in 1974 launched the brand new Crop Over Festival that, over the past 40 years, has evolved into Julian Marryshaw’s dream of an event attractive to Bajans and visitors alike.
Regrettably, I had to miss yesterday’s start of the anniversary celebrations by having to be in Miami at this year’s Caribbean Culinary Competition as I am involved with communications for the Barbados Hotel & Tourism Association and the Barbados team.
But from next weekend, nuffing else en missin muh.
• Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.