THE ATMOSPHERE SEEMED ordained for a celebration of an extraordinary life, a career full of international achievement and an abundance of well-wishes for several more years to come.
Just as important, the ambience was picture perfect.
It was a warm Sunday afternoon in late July when the guests began to arrive at a comfortable Chinese restaurant along Union Turnpike, a busy thoroughfare that dissects a quiet middle class community in Queens, New York.
Known for its delicious food and welcoming ambience, Peking House may at first glance appear to be an unusual place for a prominent Caribbean and African-American folklorist, composer and songwriting great who gave the world some of its most immortal music to be celebrating his 93rd birthday, surrounded by close friends and relatives who were serenading him.
“He has earned it,” said one of the well-wishers.
But after hearing his explanation, it became clear why Burgie, an inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, who was known in his heyday in American music circles as Lord Burgess, a guitar-playing, energetic stage performer who in 1966 wrote the words of Barbados’ National Anthem, had made such an excellent choice.
“I have been dining at Peking House for decades and I thought my closest friends and relatives would enjoy it as much as I have over the years,” said the New York-born Bajan-American, whose songs remain as fresh in people’s minds as the days in the mid-1950s when they were first introduced to a global audience by Harry Belafonte, perhaps the world’s first black matinee idol.
The birthday marked the attainment of yet another milestone for the father of two sons, Irving and Andrew, both graduates of Yale University.
The guests, almost 50 of them, enjoyed themselves and dropped a broad hint when they sang one of his memorable creations and injected a line that they were looking forward to being back next year when, God willing, he celebrates his 94th.
“Of course, you will be back,” the birthday boy told them with a broad smile on his face.
Burgie’s head of hair may be as white as snow and he may walk more slowly than a quarter of a century ago, but he is in full control of his mental faculties, enjoys a good joke and a delicious meal, readily recalls chapters in his illustrious career and perks up whenever Barbados is mentioned.
There are some excellent reasons why nostalgia becomes the dominating emotion when the island is cited.
One can be traced to his late mother, Viola Calendar, whose last name was changed to Burgie when she married her husband Louis Burgie, an African-American with family roots in Virginia, and started to raise a family in Brooklyn. They had two sons and a daughter and worked hard to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table and clothes on their backs.
Secondly, there is the memorable link between Burgie and Barbados’ Independence: the National Anthem.
“It’s a source of great pride and satisfaction to know you have contributed something, a major symbol, the National Anthem, that has helped to make Barbadians so proud of their country,” he said the other day.
Thirdly, Burgie donates the monetary prizes to the winners of an annual competition that encourages Bajan youth to express themselves in essays, poetry and other literary works.
“The purpose is to get them to write,” he said.
“I’ve had a good life, an exciting one and I have travelled the world. My music, composing skill and artistic ability have enabled me to do all of those things.
“It’s gratifying to know that people in almost every member state of the United Nations know my songs and sing them with gusto and nostalgia, more than 60 years after they were first recorded.”
But the composer isn’t resting on his laurels.
He is working on a screenplay based on his early 1960s Off-Broadway production of Ballad For Bimshire, a musical that was set in Barbados.
“I intend to see it produced and completed,” Burgie told THE NATION.
“I am hoping Rihanna would become involved in it.” (TB)