In His Own Words: Bob Andy’s journey of artistry, heritage, and independence

Considered among Jamaica’s most remarkable singer-songwriters, Keith ‘Bob Andy’ Anderson was born on October 28, 1944, in Kingston. During Heritage Week, Bob scored his eightieth birthday from the ancestral realm on Monday.

This is consequential because Bob Andy exemplified an independent worldview, a perspective devoid of the cliché shenanigans on which average journeymen, hoping to impress, rely. He bequeathed a legacy of incisive social and political perceptiveness and significant creative responses to human experiences, not limited to triumphs and defeats.

The recently released deluxe recording We Remember Bob Andy (VPCD2763 ) provides a remarkably significant, unpretending, and spiritual understanding of this extraordinary artiste and songwriter’s creativeness, intellect, and essence. Bob Andy’s life and career were filled with industry respect, critical superlatives, and audience appreciation. Whether singing his songs, others covering them (which became hits for Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson, Marcia Griffiths, and others) or hearing them interpreted by contemporary reggae artistes, as is the case of We Remember Bob Andy, what becomes evident is the scope and depth of the subject matter and entertainment value.

Bob Andy’s mastery of his craft and his accomplishments were endowed by and are beholden to the compositional standards set by predecessors like Dan Williams, an authentic songwriter of the mento generation, and Wilfred ‘Jackie’ Edwards, a writer of consistent excellence during the pre-ska era. His artistry represents a phenomenal contribution to Jamaica’s cultural heritage. It is a legacy forged from a history of plantation bondage, colonial subjugation, political intrigue, and constant struggle for liberation. Bob Andy’s attributes and contributions should be deliberated when celebrating National Heritage Month.

Analysing a few seminal compositions through history and socio-musicology disciplines is essential to better understanding Bob Andy’s work as entertainment and simultaneously as a personal or autobiographical portrayal that is culturally rewarding, sociopolitically engaging, and enlightening.

UNINTERESTED IN SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS

Never commercially driven, Bob Andy’s rejection of deals by foreign recording companies in favour of remaining independent and being artistically unrestricted was personally fulfilling rather than economically rewarding. He seemed uninterested in socioeconomic status. His interest was pursuing and expressing the historical memories and sociopolitical values he embodied and understood as his responsibility and found artistically satisfying. Bob Andy’s compositions contemplated the human condition. It echoed his commitment to uplift humanity and interrogate society and its political consequences reflected in the resourcefulness and vulnerabilities, especially of the common folk.

The autobiographical hit song, Let Them Say, finds Bob Andy at a psychological, economic, and frustrating low point and highlights how Bob Andy responded to rumours that he was mad.

People see me acting strange

They might say it is a burning shame

But the people don’t realise the pangs of hell that I feel

So let them say I’m mad; they don’t know how it feels to be sad

I don’t know who could be glad in a situation like this

My last shirt’s torn off my back, but that’s not quite the fact

My shoe is down to my sock

No place to lay my head; I don’t even own a bed

And I can’t remember when I’ve eaten bread

Bob Andy’s reaction reveals how adept composers can address social situations, both personally and communally, through pop culture and how doing so does not require a response that indicates irritation. Coming of age in a society where British colonialism promoted and maintained a culture of control over personal and collective black expression, Bob Andy was considered “mad” by those whose minds were shackled within that system. He was mad because he represented a generation whose anguish, delights, realities, and optimism embodied almost four hundred years of displacement and indignity. As a devotee of Rastafari, his lifestyle and music mirrored their desire for freedom from colonialism and a willingness to “go back home”.

Perhaps Bob Andy’s best-known song is I’ve Got to Go Back Home. It explores the cultural, political, spiritual, and pleasurable vibrations of music and embeds into our subconscious ways of understanding these aspects of life communicated through compositions of some of the most socially conscious and insightful artistes – reggae or otherwise. It explores the realistic and conceptual universe of freedom.

On the other hand, I’ve Got to Go Back Home endures among the most conscious set of perennial favourites because it addresses history and continues to be current in addressing contemporary social issues. Still, for a group of others, it sounds like a plantation lament and provides an avenue of examination into the physiological or belief system many Africans enslaved in the Americas retained.

It is a system of beliefs that touches the collective memory of black people across the African Diaspora, including some Jamaicans. It is consciously connected to an account of enslavement, the yearning to return to a homeland, imagined or real, which entails travel facilitated by spiritual powers if not physical means.

NO STABLE HOME

Not having the stability of a home was also a personal experience for Bob Andy – he was rejected by his mother and confined to the Maxfield Park Children’s Home. He resided for some time at Coxone’s Studio One premiss on Brenford Road while carrying out his duties as record delivery boy before temporarily dwelling at Count Ossie’s Polka Flat Camp on Wareika Hill. In a 2011 conversation, Bob was able to provide an understanding of the song after examining the idea of flying Africans:

“ I’ve Got to Go Back Home came to me in words and music. It was a tearful early morning sitting at the piano at Studio One before going out on my delivery route. I didn’t realise the budding Rastafarian period was that profound inside me, so the conscious and subconscious extended to thoughts of repatriation. Coming out of Let Them Say, I was looking back. I was a runaway and basically homeless, kotching in Rockfort. Being exposed to Count Ossie and others at Poka Flat, they made Africa seem like heaven. So, as a runaway and homeless, home was going through my mind, as well as going home to heaven, Ethiopia, a beautiful place. So to me, that was what that song was about,” Bob Andy said in one of my interviews with him on September 27, 2011.

That anguish also feeds into the plight of the migrant trapped in an alien land – hence, Go Back Home is an anthem for those in the Jamaican Diaspora. Furthermore, he had little formal education and was proudly self-educated. He would say, “This was a good thing”.

Following I’ve Got to Go Back Home, death and freedom metaphors continued infusing Bob Andy’s mind. In his composition Unchained, Bob Andy’s straightforward connections to chains, freedom, bondage, slavery, and being an “independent man” are noticeable. As he did in I’ve Got To Go Back Home, Bob Andy also invoked death as a signifier of freedom and independence.

Similarly, in Going Home, he addresses the train phenomena as an analogy for freedom. As with flying and rivers, trains have also signified liberation for diasporan Africans, and Bob Andy’s utilisation of that trope signifies freedom.

While Bob was a consistent and versatile lyric poet on social and political issues, his writing was also illustrative regarding personal matters. His song Desperate Lover addresses lost love, and in the lyrics, he laments and grieves his despondency about love lost.

Bob Andy was unambiguous about the circumstances surrounding his personal experiences, including substance abuse. You Don’t Know is candidly instructive.

You don’t know how you make your family feel

To do the things that’s real

Say the things that please

Say you’re on cocaine

Or you should change your name

They even say you’re insane

You should know how you let your rich friends down

To hear you’re in the slums

Existing just on crumbs

They don’t know the joys within

That you share with your ghetto’s kin

You’re tired of rich happenings

They don’t know how it gives you joy inside

To see them (the rich friends)run and hide

When bills flow in like tide

They should be walking proud

Express themselves aloud

Not hiding from the collecting crowd.

CULTURAL AESTHETICS

At its most appreciatively developed, popular expression has entertained and informed masses either seeking the pleasures of the arts as cultural aesthetics or as an escape from reality. For some, it is cathartic. For those who conceive, compose, record, sing, perform, or imbibe such deep feelings, sharing experiences real, imagined, or inspired is liberating.

Bob Andy was an artist who personified composers and lyricists who contributed to shaping society. Specifically, he produced music that balanced entertaining and uplifting consciousness in an atmosphere of constant tension with self-awareness, political intrigue, and race and class prejudices.

He was concerned with autobiographical issues ( You Don’t Know), repatriation ( I’ve Got To Go Back Home), political matters ( Fire Burning), heartbreak ( Desperate Lover), affirming love ( Honey), celebrating life ( Sun Shines For Me), freedom ( Unchained), multinational unity ( Friends), and envisioning a world of harmony( Life Could Be A Symphony).

Despite reflecting hurt and despair, Bob Andy’s lyrics are also incredibly insightful and inspiring because he doesn’t dwell on despondency. Instead, he employs a stylised elaboration of distinction voiced through particular idiomatic expressions illuminated by the alteration of language to provide hope. As such, instead of supplying the public with hopelessness, Bob Andy provided messages to make them self-reliant and agents of individual, social and political change. Singer, songwriter, sociopolitical observer, and cultural critic Keith “Bob Andy” Anderson defines Jamaican heritage through his journey, aspirations, challenges, failures, and successes. In the artistic realm, Bob Andy remains paramount. He epitomises an Independent Man.

Herbie Miller is a socio-musicologist with an interest in slave culture, Jamaican popular music, and jazz.