It’s like home away from home whenever Gerald Alston visits Jamaica.

His first trip here was with The Manhattans in 1973, and the singer never tires of the country.

The Manhattans are headliners for Red Rose For Gregory, which takes place May 14 at Hope Gardens in St Andrew.

Etana, J C Lodge, and Deniece Williams will also perform on the Mother’s Day event.

Alston, who joined The Manhattans in 1970 at 19 years old, remembers the group breaking through in the United States with There’s No Me Without You shortly before their maiden voyage to Jamaica. They had a number of hits that decade, including Kiss And Say Goodbye, Hurt, We Never Danced to A Love Song, and Shining Star.

Red Rose For Gregory maintains a busy post-COVID schedule for The Manhattans, who performed throughout the United States and South Africa last year. The latter is one of their strongest markets.

“It’s a very good market for us. Next to the United States, we’ve sold more records there [South Africa] than any part of the world. We’ve been going since 1996 and the second time we went we found out that during Apartheid a lot of the African brothers and sisters played Manhattans music,” Alston disclosed. “We play Johannesburg, Durban, Pretoria, East London, Cape Town…we play all over.”

North Carolina-born, Alston is sole survivor of the line-up that made The Manhattans bona fide R&B stars in the 1970s. Winfred “Blue” Lovett, Ed “Sonny” Bivins, Kenneth “Wally” Kelly, and Richard “Ricky” Taylor, who formed the group in 1962, have died.

Troy May and Lawrence Newton are other members of the current Manhattans. Newton replaced David Tyson, who died in February last year.

Like most of their contemporaries, The Manhattans have not had a mainstream hit song in many years, but the classics they recorded in the 1970s and 1980s have kept them busy on the road. Some of those songs, including Shining Star and Kiss and Say Goodbye, have been sampled by pop acts which have introduced them to new fans in the US and Latin America.

“A lot of the young fans, when they hear a sample, they realise that’s the core of their music, that that’s where real R&B started in the 60s and 70s. Because of our writing…we wrote about our lives and what’s going on. A lot of the songs written in this generation are just tunes, they weren’t really songs that people could hold on to and reflect…they are just gimmicks and catches, but now they’re beginning to write songs like we wrote,” Alston explained.

The Manhattans Featuring Gerald Alston: The Legacy Continues, the trio’s latest album, was released in 2021.