Time to honour Winston Wallace, says Grub Cooper
With 2025 recipients of national honours and awards expected to be announced next week, on Independence Day, Grub Cooper hopes one person will finally get his due — Winston Wallace, the man who wrote Land Of My Birth, winner of the 1978 Festival Song Contest.
Sung by Eric Donaldson, it is considered by many the country’s unofficial national anthem. While the song is played at patriotic events year-round in Jamaica and in its Diaspora, Wallace remains unheralded.
“I would like them to give this man his due, because di song is iconic in di Jamaican space and Diaspora. It is the greatest patriotic song… It touches everyone, whether young or old,” said Cooper in an interview with the Jamaica Observer.
Cooper arranged Land Of My Birth as well as played drums and saxophone on it. He had a similar role for Sweet Jamaica, another Wallace-written song performed by Donaldson that won ‘Festival’ the previous year.
He first met Wallace during the 1960s when both of them were students at Jamaica School of Agriculture in St Catherine. Neither man pursued an agricultural career, and when their paths next crossed, a decade later, Cooper was an established musician with Fabulous Five band.
Wallace was then a teacher involved in the trade union movement.
Sweet Jamaica, their first collaboration, was a feel-good, reggae rocker, but it was the follow-up that moved Cooper.
“The words to Land Of My Birth are excellent! Very patriotic, even more patriotic than the (national) anthem, which is more like a prayer,” he said. “Immediately, it sparks something in you as a patriotic Jamaican.”
In a 2014 interview with the Observer, Wallace said Land Of My Birth was inspired by political unrest in Jamaica. Although there were songs decrying those tribal times, he heard none espousing patriotism.
Entries in the Festival Song Contest received sustained airplay 47 years ago, which made Land Of My Birth an overwhelming favourite going into finals night. It gave Donaldson his third victory in the annual event.
Wallace received $1,200 for his winning song.
Donaldson and Cooper are members of the Order of Distinction, Jamaica’s sixth-highest honour.
Winston Wallace
