One of the great regrets of my life is that I was in school in America during the rise and heyday of the Messengers combo, roughly 1966 and 1967.

When I came home for vacation in 1967, my right leg had been broken playing football. I had a cast from toes to hip. One night I sat at a dance in the back of a hall on New Road where the Messengers played. And during the same summer, or probably after I came home in the middle of 1968, I went to a christening where the Messengers played in a yard in Yabra. The father/host at the christening was Coffee, a guy who used to work at Cable and Wireless, where my younger brother, Nelson, also worked. This would be before Cable and Wireless became Belize Telecommunications Authority (BTA). 

In my youth, the exciting groups of young black men to emerge from Belize City neighbourhoods were Dunlop in football in the late 1950s and the Messengers in music in the mid-1960s. Neither lasted very long. The British mahogany, chicle and insurance giant, Belize Estate and Produce Company (BEC), quickly hired several of the top Dunlop players, and a couple others went to the States. Dunlop became BEC.

In the case of the Messengers, and I believe the name would have come from the famous American jazz ensemble, Art Blakey and the Messengers, the story in the streets was that the rum and club entrepreneur, Rick Castillo, who owned the instruments the Messengers were using, took the instruments away for some reason and left the Messengers stranded, left them to become just a history legend in Belize music.

Lord Gerald Rhaburn has said that when he went to Guatemala in 1962 to record the classic TROPICO Y RITMO album, he wanted to take the teenaged saxophone prodigy, Pete Matthews, Jr., with him, but Pete was only sixteen. So Rhaburn had to get special permission from some government authority or the other so that Pete could travel with him. Pete absolutely starred on that album.

In the KREM Radio studio one night two or three decades ago, Dickie Straughan, himself an outstanding saxophonist, said that Pete had “big ears.” I think this must be a term musicians would use to describe a musician who can hear things the rest of us mortals can not.

The story of Pete Matthews became a tragedy, because in the black community we don’t know how to take care of our own. Pete smoked reefer (illegal at the time), as did Bill Belisle, the other famous Messengers saxophonist. But Bill said it was for his asthma, plus Bill was very light-skinned. I believe he would go to Mexico to play with combos there. What I mean is, maybe life was a little easier for Bill after the Messengers than for Pete. 

(There was a band named Los Aragon that used to come from Mexico to play in Belize. I can’t say if they came from Chetumal or Merida, but Los Aragon were very, very good. Then, there was another Mexican band called Los Dinners, or something like that. Tony Wright would know more.)

Pete was a quiet guy who had, as Dickie Straughan said, “big ears.” It always seemed as if he was hearing music in his head. He was the definition, to my mind, of a musical genius. The other Belizean music genius of our time, Frankie Reneau, was respectable, had been adopted as a child by Miss Sybil Reyes and sent to Mrs. Floss Casasola’s music school, then went on to London and success after success.    

Anyway, Pete was just drifting along in the 1970s, and raising a family. The Deputy Prime Minister of the ruling PUP, Hon. C. L. B. Rogers, gave Pete a job working with the Police Band. It always looked strange to see this great musical artist in a police uniform.

So it was that tragedy struck during the Heads of Agreement uprisings around late March and April of 1981. The story was that Pete was upstairs of the Queen Street Police Station when he was shot, supposedly by a fellow officer. A part of the story in the streets was that Pete was refusing to participate in riot control.

Pete left two or three sons who later got into trouble with the law. I always thought this was so sad, because I believed Pete’s sons probably inherited the same musical genius he himself had inherited from his father.  

The other members of the Messengers I remember, besides Pete and Bill, were Chuck Gladden on guitar, Lloyd Franklin and Vincent “Winty J” Johnson on drums and percussion. The controversial, sensational vocalist was the young Ulloyd Henderson, who I believe was a distant cousin of mine. Ulloyd was singing Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Roy C, and other American rhythm and blues vocalists like that. This type of music was new to Belize, and it created a sensation amongst Belizean youth. Meanwhile, Pete and Bill were playing jazz riffs that excited Belize.

I remember when I came home for holiday in ’67, my first cousin, Georgia Belisle, had a good friend we called Brenda The Belizean. She was tall and black, and she asked me if I knew of Otis. Well, the fact of the matter was that Otis Redding was an American musical legend, had been one for years, but Radio Belize was not playing Otis. It was Ulloyd and the Messengers who brought Otis to Belize, and roots people went wild. I believe it was the winter of that same ’67 that Otis died in a plane crash in Wisconsin. I was still in school in America.

So Dunlop and the Messengers shone brightly only briefly before splitting the scene. Thus it was that when Pulu Lightburn brought out the Happy Homebuilders, the youth basketball equivalent of Dunlop in football and the Messengers in music, around 1977/78, it was no surprise to me that the basketball power structure quickly decided to resign and leave the sport without an administrative structure. No surprise, because when the downtrodden roots community of the old capital produces miracles like Dunlop, Messengers, and the Homebuilders, something almost automatically goes wrong, and the respectable black community does not protect its roots geniuses. Just saying.