Folk Songs of Guyana in Words and Music: Queh-queh, Chanties and Plantation Themes

Brathwaite, Serena U. & P.A. Brathwaite, Eds., Folk Songs of Guyana in Words and Music: Queh-queh, Chanties and Plantation Themes, Guyana: P.A. Brathwaite, 1966.

Percy A. Brathwaite has been considered by some to be one of Guyana's prominent musical critics during the mid-20th century. He has been considered a pioneer - one of the first persons to regularly write reviews on musical and other cultural events in Guyana. During the 1940s through the 1960s his reviews were published in The Daily Argosy and The Daily Chronicle through columns such as The Forum and The Clef. Brathwaite's framework for evaluating music in Guyana was based on formal training in the European genres and solid exposure to Guyanese hinterland, rural, and urban idioms. His critical abilities were further sharpened by his significant personal experiences as a hinterland worker, choir founder and conductor, amateur athletic coach, folk researcher and song catcher, scoutmaster, journalist, music teacher, poet, labour leader, and author. Braithwaite, who died at the age of 90 in 1993, is remembered as a versatile man - a Renaissance man.