 Ellsworth
McGranahan “Shake” Keane was born on May 30,
1927, in St. Vincent, Caribbean. Born into a humble family that loved
books and music, he completed his early education on the island and
worked at the St. Vincent Grammar School as a “pupil-teacher”
or teaching assistant of Music, French, and English literature. Taught
to play the trumpet by his father, Charles (who died when Keane was
thirteen), Keane’s first public recital was at age six. At age
fourteen, he led a musical band made up of his brothers. In the 1940s,
with his mother Dorcas working to raise six children, the teenager
joined one of the island’s leading bands, Ted Lawrence and His
Silvertone Orchestra. The distinctive horn-playing of Keane became
a feature of the annual Vincentian carnival, long before he would
be called one of the best flugel horn players in Europe and became
known in international jazz circles during the 1950s and 1960s. His
complimentary passion to music was poetry, which he had been writing
since childhood. (It is still not certain whether the boyhood nickname
of “Shake” was short for Shakespeare because Shake so
loved literature or for the song Chocolate Milk Shake that
he loved as a youth.) Before leaving for England in 1952, to study
English literature at London University, Keane’s first two books,
L’Oubli (1950, self-published) and Ixion (1952)
were published. While he did not complete his formal studies in Europe,
he recited poetry and prose for and eventually became a producer at
Caribbean Voices, the influential BBC General Overseas Service program.
Keane’s commitment to writing was as unabated as the application
of his “sharp innovative intelligence” to playing music--mambo,
kaiso, highlife, and “free form” jazz. Some of his early
poetry, probably because of his music, shows some of the first signs
of the jazz inflections that would come to significantly influence
Caribbean freestyle and dub poetry decades later. In 1972, the musician
who had played with the likes of Lord Kitchener, the Joe Harriot Quintet,
and Kurt Edelhagen, was back in the region, reciting his poetry at
the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (CARIFESTA) in Guyana. In
1973, Keane accepted an invitation from the government of St. Vincent
to serve as director of culture in Kingstown, capital of the island.
In 1975, the department was closed after a change in the colony’s
government administration. A year later he was appointed principal
of Bishop’s College in Georgetown, St. Vincent, and taught at
the Intermediate High School in the capital. In 1979, St. Vincent,
along with eight closely grouped sister islands, emerged from centuries
of British colonial rule to become the independent country of St.
Vincent and the Grenadines. In that historic year, Keane self-published
The Volcano Suite - A series of five poems, and he won what
is still the most prestigious pan-Caribbean literary prize, Cuba’s
Premio Casa De Las Americas 1979 Poetry. The winning collection, One
A Week With Water, was published concurrently in Havana by Casa
and remains an essential work of Keane. In 1981, after attending CARIFESTA
IV in Barbados, Shake Keane emigrated from his native land to the
USA and lived in Brooklyn, New York, with his third wife, Margaret
Bynoe. In Brooklyn, he was unable to find immediate work because of
his immigrant status and later admitted to feelings of alienation
from his “rugged” Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. But
the father of three sons, the “musical chameleon,” and
the poetic iconoclast of “all kinds of ‘sacred cows,’”
intensified his poetry writing though attended less to his music.
His poems have appeared in the literary journals Bim, Kyk-over-al,
Savacou, and Caribbean Quarterly and have been anthologized
in Caribbean Voices, Caribbean Verse, and You
Better Believe It. The only CD of his music, Real Keen: Reggae
into Jazz, was released in 1991 in London. His contemporaries,
literary giants, revolutionary poets, scholars, and admirers such
as George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gordon
Rohlehr, Edward Baugh, Adrian Fraser, Philip Nanton, Val Wilmer, and
Cecil Blazer Williams are among those who hail Shake Keane as one
of the innovative fathers of modern Caribbean literature. The
Angel Horn - Shake Keane (1927-1997) Collected Poems, an anthology
of six unpublished manuscripts, is the fifth and most comprehensive
book of Shake Keane’s poetic range and vision from the late
1940s to his last poem written in 1997. At age seventy, ailing with
stomach cancer, the gray-bearded giant who towered at six-foot-four,
died in Oslo, Norway, in 1997 -- at the start of a jazz tour. In 2003,
Shake Keane, poet, musician, educator, raconteur, “the grand
egalitarian,” was honored by his country with the unveiling
of a life-size bust at the Peace Memorial Hall in Kingstown. |
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Author's
Book Details |
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The
Angel Horn Shake Keane (1927-1997) Collected Poemsby Shake Keane
Paperback, poetry, literature, 182 pp.
ISBN:
0-913441-66-X
The Angel Horn…
is vintage Shake Keane. … spanning a period of 40 years
the best of Keane, his mastery of the folk culture, play on
words, use of nation language and of musical symbols and themes,
and the integration of rhymes and riddles … .
- Dr. Adrian Fraser, author, scholar, St. Vincent &
The Grenadines $18 Book
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