Dear Editor,

We often speak about music as entertainment. We remember the songs we danced to, the songs that accompanied first loves, heartbreaks, and celebrations. Yet there are songs that do something far more profound, they quietly prepare us for life.

This is a public thank you to Beres Hammond for giving me one of those songs.

I grew up in Montego Bay during the 1980s, in a home where music mattered. My mother adored Beres Hammond. His albums occupied a place of honour in our house, alongside artistes like Air Supply, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Sam Cooke. She owned them on vinyl and cassette, and Putting Up Resistance became part of the soundtrack of my childhood.

What makes that remarkable is that, unlike many songs we only come to appreciate as adults, this one spoke to me immediately. The message wasn’t beyond my understanding simply because I was young. It made perfect sense because I was already witnessing it every day.

My father would leave home at three and four o’clock in the morning, driving deep into the Jamaican countryside to buy produce and goods before the rest of us had even opened our eyes. He was supplying hotels and customers, working tirelessly to build a business and provide opportunities for his family that he himself had never enjoyed.

Then I heard Beres Hammond singing “Blow wind blow, blow wind blow/I want to stay home tonight/I long to spend some time with the family/But staying home won’t make it right.” Those words helped me understand my father’s sacrifice. They taught me that love is not always measured by the hours spent at home. Sometimes love looks like leaving before dawn so your children can have a better life.

The song acknowledges something every Jamaican knows, but few songs express so honestly: “Try to save myself from drown/There’s an overnight scheme all worked out/ Designed to keep ah me down”. We all know there are times when it feels as though unseen forces continually frustrate honest effort. Bureaucracy, economic hardship, disappointment, and circumstance can create the feeling that the odds are permanently tilted against ordinary people.

Yet the brilliance of Putting Up Resistance is that it refuses to stop there. It does not deny the existence of hardship. It does not pretend the system is always fair; instead, it insists that surrender is not the answer.

Those words have echoed through every stage of my adult life. As a journalist, community activist, husband, and father, I have encountered enough setbacks to become cynical. There have been moments when it would have been easy to conclude that nothing changes, that hard work is futile, that integrity is for fools.

But every time those thoughts have crept in, I have remembered the spirit of that song. It taught me something invaluable: I could recognise injustice without allowing it to poison my character. I could acknowledge the difficulties of the Jamaican condition without becoming bitter about them. I could keep believing that honest effort still matters. That is no small gift.

We often celebrate artistes for their awards, chart success, and sold-out concerts, but we speak less often about the quiet ways they shape the moral imagination of a nation. Looking back, I realise that while my father showed me what perseverance looked like, Beres Hammond gave me the language to understand it. He put melody to discipline. He gave rhythm to resilience. He transformed the daily struggle of ordinary Jamaicans into something dignified rather than despairing.

I suspect I am not alone. There must be thousands of Jamaicans who unknowingly carried lessons from his music into adulthood. Songs like Putting Up Resistance were more than recordings, they were companions. They reminded us that endurance is not weakness, that perseverance is not naïveté, and that hope is itself an act of resistance.

Thank you, Beres Hammond, for reminding a young Jamaican boy that life would be difficult without convincing him it was hopeless.

Yannick Pessoa

yannickpessoa@yahoo.com