Exactly one month before my 15th birthday in October 1964, I experienced something that I didn’t realize until very recently informed the next 60 years of my life.
It was music.
I had landed in a hockey stadium that held nearly 5,000 people in Troy, New York, a few miles from where I briefly attended a boarding school.
Harry Belafonte was in the news enough back then that I probably did know who he was when I somehow found my way to a seat high up in the bleachers that night.
I may have even seen him a year earlier on the Ed Sullivan Show — a wildly popular “variety show” as they were called back then that ran on CBS in the same Sunday nighttime slot for 23 years.
But nothing could have prepared me for the soul-piercing pitch of Belafonte live — his beautiful face glistening in a lone spotlight on the otherwise darkened stage — as he sang “Try to Remember,” accompanied by a lone guitar and one backup vocalist. The pin-drop silence that also accompanied his opening song that night makes me think everyone in the audience was holding their breath — as was I — hoping to capture forever those clear, rich, joyful notes.
It seems I have.
I have told that story hundreds of times over the years, never realizing in how many ways the chords struck that autumn evening had been reverberating and inextricably woven into who I was to become.
Last week, in a moment of contemplative clarity, I saw how decisions I had made over the years had been informed by the spirit that had taken up residency in my soul that night.
All art is a gift and crucial to meaningful human existence. But there is nothing that will make me as instantly happy as the first few chords of a familiar song. Often, because of that experience so long ago, the joy is accompanied by memories of the many other live performances I have been graced to attend — all of them because I made the decision to be there thanks to the spark that still fires up that memory and all of the other joys that were built upon that first live performance.
Scores of those magical musical moments took place for me at the cherished Reichhold Center for the Arts on the St. Thomas campus of the University of the Virgin Islands, which was ravaged by the 2017 hurricanes. This is a list of the world-renowned performers, including not only singers and instrumentalists but also dance companies, orchestras, choirs, poets and writers who graced the stage from 1978 until 2017.
It provides only one side of the history of the gorgeous, acoustically perfect, stone-walled amphitheater that animated and amplified untold numbers of lives as names such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nancy Wilson and Ray Charles — among dozens of others equally famous — raised spirits over nearly decades of once-in-a-lifetime imported performances.
As for the exporting, Reichhold Center for the Arts provided the launching pad from which dozens of Virgin Islands shooting stars began their journeys toward illuminating larger venues across the globe.
The late David Edgecombe, Reichhold director for 12 years and the man who gave birth to STARfest, an annual talent showcase for local youth, prophesied 21 years ago, “With all the talent around here, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of our own making it big.”
There are so many to recall, but there are two Virgin Islanders who won top honors this year, bringing pride to our community and reaching a pinnacle of their long-held dreams.
Theron Thomas, who with his brother Timothy formed the Hip Hop group R. City was named Songwriter of the Year at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. Their career was originally launched during a STARfest presentation.
In October, trumpeter Rashawn Ross will be inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame along with the other members of the world-renowned Dave Matthews Band. Ross has been with Dave Matthews full-time since 2006. Ross’s journey also crossed the Reichhold stage many times.
The current dream held close in the heart of longtime Reichhold advocate, former technical director and current Director Denise Humphrey is to raise the millions of dollars required to resurrect the theater from the death blows dealt by Irma and Maria, the two back-to-back Category 5 storms that not only wreaked havoc on the physical plant, but also swept away the archive treasury — including the video recordings — that Humphrey had accumulated.
“We lost everything,” she said.
But for many of us the memories hold strong along with the faith that this community will see to it that for generations to come our rising stars will have a place from which to launch their dreams both by inspiration as audience members as well as by real-time experience on the stage at the Reichhold Center for the Arts.
But faith without works is dead.
Accordingly, on Sunday, Aug. 18 the University of the Virgin Islands’ Reichhold Center for the Arts will hold the second annual Blue Horizon Concert featuring four-time Grammy-nominated reggae band UB40.
The outdoor concert will take place at 6 p.m. on the Herman E. Moore Golf Course on the Orville E. Kean Campus on St. Thomas.
The Blue Horizon Concert is a fundraiser. Proceeds will be shared between the Reichhold Center restoration efforts and the Addie Ottley Community Service Scholarship Fund that supports UVI students pursuing studies in communication.
Now in its third year, the musical series was launched in 2022 in tribute to another local legend, Addie Ottley.
Humphrey is juggling various figures to bring the center back to life that range somewhere between $20 and $32 million. Former University of the Virgin Islands President David Hall told senators at a budget hearing that donations of $20 million would be needed over and above federal funding in order to rebuild the center, according to Humphrey.
Ray Charles appeared on the Reichhold stage in the center’s eighth season, in 1986.
With video of that performance destroyed, we are left only to our collective memory.
I choose to believe that he sang this song that night and that it was also — like Edgecombe’s vision — a portent of the future for our once starlit stage … that it will rise from the devastation to make dreams come true again.
Anyone wishing to help give rise to the restoration of the stage that will spawn new memories and spark the next generations of youthful yearnings, please call Denise Humphrey at 340-693-1552 or email reichhold.center@uvi.edu.
