Tales tickle in between songs

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Sir Willard White is renowned for his singing, but at Sunday evening's concert at The Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, New Kingston, he engaged the large audience with a few in-between song tales.

A keen ear was required for those in the more removed reaches of the ballroom, what with Sir Willard's speaking voice which is somewhere in the lowest frequencies of the vocal cords. However, there was complete silence when he spoke, so that not only the voice but also the humour carried well.

All the stories were personal and related to the material, coming mostly in the second - and much longer - segment of the programme.

Before singing I Bought Me a Cat in the first suite of songs in the post-interval session, Sir Willard said that after one performance of the Aaron Copeland song he was brought to task.

"Someone quite close to me said 'why do you sing that song? It is a stupid song. It is an insult to your performance'," Sir Willard said. He replied: "I like it. People seem to like it'."

"Today, I am going to sing that song. And you need not tell me what you think. I am going to enjoy it," Sir Willard said to laughter, going on to do the song with approximations of animal sounds.

He had a longer tale for the next song, Some Enchanted Evening from the musical South Pacific. "I saw that!" Sir Willard said and there was a brief back and forth with an audience member about the location, the (former) Regal in Cross Roads settled on.

Resistance

"Anyway, it was in Kingston I saw it, where my experiences prepared me so much for some wonderful places," White said.

One of those places was St Lucia, where Sir Willard had an encounter which brought home the reach and impact of Jamaica. He holds two passports, Jamaican and British, and customarily presents the latter. "If you present a Jamaican passport you can be guaranteed a certain resistance," White said.

However, White's British passport states that he was born in Jamaica and the immigration officer confirmed this before asking "what do you do?" White replied "I am an opera singer."

The reaction was startling. "He closed the passport, slammed it in the desk and said what is wrong with you people? You are into everything!" White related, to an outburst of laughter and applause. "He went on to say 'I want to go to that place. My country, they don't have anything like that. Have a good time'," White said.

Before starting the set of songs from Porgy and Bess, White spoke about the difficulty of the material. "I know of lots of young men, grasping at the chance to be onstage - and it kill them!" White said, eyes wide. And there was a time when he passed up on the possible singer's suicide when, as a young man himself, he was offered the part. He refused and the production's organisers insisted. He then said "pay me US$5,000 per performance for the four performances per week". As intended, that got rid of them as "I did not hear from them after".

"Many years later, when I reached some maturity, I was offered again and I said yes," White said, before I Got Plenty o' Nothin'.