The old guard

 Jamaica has recently lost so many of the old guard singers who have rocked the world with great reggae music, the latest being Jimmy Cliff, that it's depressing.

And seeing how shaky the great Ernie Smith looked didn't help my feelings of unease.

Steve Higgins greets Ernie Smith 

In fact seeing him needing to sit on a stool to perform, reminded me of the last time I saw the late, great Pluto Shervington. He died about 3 weeks after I saw him perform (around 2years years ago,) while also needing a stool, as he was obviously not well. (JOAN, MY VIEWS.: A.J delivered! 💓)

The good thing about Ernie though is that although he looked very shaky, his voice was still powerful, so let's hope he will be around for many more years.

This event was the annual Christmas Carol service which I look forward to. 

This turned out to be much more than just regular affair though.

Apart from the pleasant surprise of having Ernie Smith appear, the Cuban pastor from a nearby church, also visited, all dressed in Jamaican colors and did a Bob Marley number.

 Not bad at all.

The other surprise appearance was by Father Richard Holung with some members of the 'Brothers of the Poor' and they too did a number.

Father Holung also looks shaky.

Father Holung greets Ernie Smith 

Bwoy, all my contemporaries are looking shaky, so I guess I am too.

Man I hate old age😡.

Well at least our Consul General is still young!😊

He loves to perform and did a decent job as usual.

And of course there was the performance from the regular choir, the South Florida Caribbean Chorale, and the organizer, Steve Higgins.

Steve Higgins always puts on good concerts and it's now a family affair, as his young son Matthew sometimes performs, and last night he brought on another son who plays the drums.

Steve Higgins in front on keyboard and son behind on drums.

I always enjoy his productions and saw many familiar faces, as we start gearing up for the Christmas holidays.🌲⛄☃️🌰

Pretty good start of the season.

Nb. Bernie Smith was buried Saturday 16th May 2026. Link: https://joan-myviews.blogspot.com/2026/03/reggae-supreme.html?m=1.

Bye Jimmy🙏

Another great Jamaican reggae legend has gone ahead.

Jimmy Cliff was one of my favorite artists and "the devil in me": https://youtu.be/Fd7fuMh5rfw?si=q9LOaGjxZ94jvpmV and "many rivers to  cross": https://youtu.be/-y9Q7ud7Or0?si=ximUOF4poV5dU2pD,  were the absolute best of reggae.

Walk good Jimmy. Your name is forever etched in history.

Jamaicans early?

 I never knew Jamaican people could be  early!

Well most were for the fund raising concert put on by celebrated Jamaican tenor Steve Higgins, to raise funds for the victims of that terrible hurricane, Melissa.

This was held in Plantation, Florida.

 I arrived promptly at 3 pm and the church was already full to the brim. We only got seated in a small room (prayer room?) behind the regular seating area.

Others who arrived after that had to stand till they found and transported chairs which must have been in storage.

Late comers waiting for seats.

It was a really good concert with not only the tenor and his chorale taking us through several genres of Jamaican music, from Belafonte to Marley. 

I especially appreciated how MC/ host Higgins paid tribute to some of our great writers/musicians, who wrote such memorable lyrics.  

Special mention was made of Noel and Beverly Dexter, Olive Lewin and Paulette Bellamy.

My favorite rendition was "the Prayer"  performed by Steve Higgins and Dahlia Wynter.

In my book, only Bocelli and Celine Dion could have outperformed on them👍.

There was a surprise performance by 'Brick and Lace who did Jimmy Cliff's 'many rivers to cross' among other songs.

The two sisters who used to perform in Jamaica under that moniker were good.

 Then they disappeared. I should have expected that they disappeared to the USA!  The other surprise was that now they are three! Another sister?

The new Brick and Lace?

It was a very entertaining afternoon and I am sure they raised a lot of funds and got many other donations, as the air was one of 'Jamaicans anxious to assist their fellow country people who suffered terribly from the devastating ravages of Melissa. '

Hope the donations get to the thousands who need it most.

Yes, I am a born cynic but my decades of seeing the wrong people benefitting from everything, hasn't cured my cynicism.

It has only fertilized it.

The pastor with tenor Steve Higgins 

Evening time/Panfest

 It's almost the eve of the Tallawah Mento Band and the Jamaican Folk Review's  historic trip to Ghana to compete in Panafest 2025. 

The taste they gave attendees at the Lauderdale Performing Arts Center was more like a bellyful.

A bellyful of music, laughs, dance,  kumina and happinesses!

Panafest (the Pan African Festival of Arts and Culture), is a biennial event established in Ghana in 1992 to unite Africans in the diaspora and on the continent and celebrate their resilience and African identity. 

Colin Smith, founder of Tallawah Mento Band and a cultural icon in his own right, explains the concept.

Kumina time

The talented cast

Panafest was the brainchild of the late, great Pan Africanist play right/author,  Efua Sutherland.

It has become a landmark festival in Ghana that gives Africans an opportunity to learn from each other wherever they are .

 This years theme is "Ensuring the African Kinship: Our Essence, Our Well-being, Our Prosperity."

Significantly, this is the first time a folkloric Jamaican entry will be involved in this auspicious,  two weeks event. 

 It took the Louise Bennett Coverly Heritage Council to make it happen.

If the taste we in Florida got is anything to go by, our entry will make a huge impact on the minds of Africans at home and abroad. It traces our progress through music and dance, from emancipation to victory.

 The performance also highlighted the contribution of world renowned artists such as Peter Tosh. Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff and the foot stomping energy of kumina music and dance, in uplifting the souls of the once downtrodden people. 

We look forward to our particants  returning home with many medals for this creative, entertaining and educational performance.

Although the crowd of attendees was enthusiastic and participated in song and dance, in my book the numbers fell short of expectation for this important fund-raising event, especially in Florida where so many Jamaicans reside.

Ps. Follow the link below for an excellent review of their performance in Ghana.

https://wiredja.com/index.php/categories/newsberg/culture/africa-the-jamaican-folk-revue-and-tallawah-mento-band-performs-at-cape-coast-castle-ghana-the-heritage-preserved

Cruising , the way to go

I think I became addicting to cruises when I went on the first one with my parents when I was 14. In those days I found the huge ship awesome but each year as competition steps up, the cruise industry is growing by huge degrees of awesomeness, with the beneficiaries being those of us who love to travel.

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This latest cruise was my first taste of Disney and it was really great although I must admit if I was a kid it would have been out of the world.

What I enjoyed most was the really great choice of destinations because for me to have gone to Sicily, the French Riviera, Naples, Pompeii, Rome, Venice in one swell swoop is just impossible to beat. And the excellent tour organisations attached to Disney were so efficient and the guides so knowledgeable,  that one was able to gain a great deal of information and see everything that one wanted to at these wonderful destinations.

One important lesson I learnt from this trip (the cruise people did not mention it at all) and I hope I will not forget the next time I go to Europe and that is, in Europe not only is the US$ not king, (as expected) but no one wants to accept it! So wherever we went we had to change cash into Euros to do any business and in Switzerland, we had to change to Swiss francs. (I had a similar experience in Cuba too as there no one wanted it or the Canadian $ either so you had to go to a cambio to change cash into pesos.) 

As I see it therefore, whenever one is not using a credit card in Europe, it is easier to just  travel with a debit card, go to a ATM machine and collect the withdrawal in the relevant currency for each day the ATM's change their rate in keeping with international standards.Anyway, back to destinations, we had quite a scare on the way to Pisa as the front tyre of the bus we were driving in suddenly burst as we were crossing a bridge. The horrendous blast scared the daylights out of not only the passengers, most of whom had been sleeping and had a rude awakening, but also the driver as well. He was however deft in  bringing the bus safely to the side of the road and as we were only 15 minutes away from Pisa we did not have to wait too long to get a replacement bus.

Actually, there is so much to say and remember about the various places we visited that I swear I have to get around to doing a separate blog for each one soon.

What was especially heartening about this cruise too was the number of Jamaicans who were working on the Disney Magic. I never knew before that  there was an actual recruiting centre in Ocho Rios so it was not unexpected that the majority of the workers came from the St. Ann/St. Mary area, although I did meet a few from Kingston  and elsewhere.Even the head waiter assigned to us was from Jamaica and boy did he make it specially great for  us by arranging jerk chicken, stew peas and rice, oxtail etc to be served to us in addition to the other delicious choices at dinner.

Heartening too was the wide selection of reggae music played in the "fun area"on the 9 th floor (Lido deck) almost every day.

It was clear that whoever the DJ was, his favourite singers were Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley but he did not stick on them too much to make it boring for our music going as far back as Harry Belafonte was played at some point.

As I said earlier, if I were a kid the cruise would have been out of this world, and that is of course because the entertainment was geared towards kids so some nights it left me a bit bored.

 However the Disney ensemble outdid itself on two nights with performances fitting of Broadway. In fact, I had the pleasure of meeting the lead singer from one of the performances, a beautiful African american young lady named Christine from Michigan, with a voice range equaling Whitney Houston's and she assured me that is where she was headed but was just enjoying travelling for a while.

Yup a Disney cruise is definitely more than worth the money for family travel

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JOAN WILLIAMS, moderator of Joan Williams on Line broadcast on POWER 106, describes herself as an unapologetic addict to the Jamaican outdoors. A foundation member of FUN AND THRILLS ADVENTURE CLUB, she explores the island at any given opportunity cycling, hiking or swimming with that group, family, Jah 3 and anyone else who will have her. In 1995, she published the popular TOUR JAMAICA and the 4^th edition is now an ebook available at;

http://www.amazon.com/Tour-Jamaica-Joan-Williams-ebook/dp/B00EJWCSHS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389464644&sr=8-1&keywords=tou