Person

Burgie, Irving

• Burgess, Lord

1924-2019

Irving Burgie has been called one of the greatest composers of Caribbean music. Son of a mother from Barbados and a father from Virginia, he was born in New York City. After high school, he sang at various clubs in New York — under the stage name Lord Burgess — until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. He served in an all-Black unit in China, Burma and India. After the war, he was accepted at Juillard School of Music and expected to become a classical singer; he also studied music at both the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California. However, he met singer Harry Belafonte at Camp Minisink run by the Harlem-based New York City Mission Society in upstate New York, and the two became friends. He and William Attaway collaborated on a version of the lyrics for the Banana Boat song (Day-O) for Belafonte, a major hit of the mid-1950s, and he went on to create 33 other songs for the Calypso star. In 1966, he wrote the lyrics for the national anthem for newly independent Barbados. He was inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in 2007.