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Imprint: BlackAmber
Format: B Format
ISBN: 9781906413446
Price: £ 6.99
Pages: 200 pp
Date: 19 August 2010
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Willard White: Rise Up Singing
Sonia Mills (About this author)
His is a voice that makes the earth rumble, and for many of his contemporaries that is their earliest memory of Willard White – the sound of his voice.
Rise Up Singing is the story of Jamaican-born bass baritone Willard White and his improbable journey from the small ‘country’ town of Ewarton to the leading opera houses of the world.
Born in 1946, in pre-independence Jamaica, Willard grew up within a typical Jamaican family structure. But it was not until he was a big 15-year-old that he entered Excelsior College ‘the school of second chance’ created by a visionary Jamaican for children ‘too old and too poor’ for the traditional high schools. This is the place that first exposed him to the music that would shape his life thereafter.
Only four years, but several worlds separated Willard’s leaving Excelsior, in July 1967, from his début in the Juilliard American Opera production of Hall Overton’s opera, Huckleberry Finn in May 1971. Since then he has been Othello and Mephistopheles and Porgy, and played every other coveted role in the bass-baritone repertoire, and many others beside.
In 1995 Willard White was awarded the CBE and was made a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2004. White has also been celebrated in his own land with its highest honours for international distinction in the performing arts.
Willard White, transformed from awkward schoolboy to imposing international celebrity, has remained an accessible, humble, human being, conscious of the fact that he found himself in the right place at the right time. His enormous talent allowed him to take the tide of opportunity at the flood. Rise Sir Willard!
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